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TRI-WEEKLY PUBLICATION OF THE BEST CURRENT ft .STANDARD I.1TF.RMURF. 


Vol. 1 F5. No. 197. Sept. 29, 1936. Annual Subserption, $110.00. 


A PHANTOM 
LOVER 


BY 

VERNON LEE 

Author of “.THE PRINCE OF THE HUNDRED 
SOUPS,” Etc., Etc. 


Knteied at the Post Office, X. Y., as second-class matter. 
Copyright, 1834, by John W. Loyi.ll Co. 


NEW-YORK 


1 John- W - Lovell- Coapany* 

& 1 6 VESEY STREET 





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ENOCH MORGAN’S SONS 



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A PHANTOM LOVER 

X. 


BY 


VERNON LEE 


\ 


AUTHOR OF 

■The Prince of the Hundred Soups,” Etc., Etc. 



ifr 


0 








**■ WASH 





NEW YORK 

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY 

14 and 16 Yesey Street 
























A Phantom Lover 


By VERNON LEE. 


That sketch up therewith the boy’s cap? Yes; that's 
the same woman. I wonder whether you could guess who 
she was. A singular being, is she not*? The most marvel- 
ous creature, quite, that I have ever met; a wonderful ele- 
gance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant ; an artificial, perverse 
sort of grace and research in every outline and movement 
and arrangement of head and neck, and hands and fingers. 
Here are a lot of pencil sketches I made while I was pre - 
paring to paint her portrait. Yes; there’s nothing but her 
in the 'whole sketch-book. Mere scratches, but they may 
give some idea of her marvelous, fantastic kind of grace. 
Here she is leaning over the staircase, and here sitting in 
the swing. Here she is walking quickly out of the room. 
That’s her head. You see she isn’t really handsome; her 
forehead is too big, and her nose too short. This gives no 
idea of her. It was altogether a question of movement. 
Look at the strange cheeks, hollow and rather flat ; well, 
when she smiled, she had most marvelous dimples here. 
There was something exquisite and uncanny about it. 
Yes ; I began the picture, but it was never finished. I did 
the husband first ; I wonder who has his likeness now ? 
Help me to move these pictures away from the wall. 
Thanks. This is her portrait ; a huge wreck. I don’t sup- 
pose you can make much of it; it is merely blocked in, 
and seems quite mad. You see my idea was to make her 
leaning against a wall — there was one hung with yellow 
that seemed almost brown — so as to bring out the sil 
houette. 

It was very singular I should have chosen that particular 
wall. It does look rather insane in this condition, but 1 
like it; it has something of her. I would frame it and 
hang it up, only people would ask questions. Yes; you 
have guessed right — it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot 
you had relations in that part of the country ; besides, 1 


2 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


suppose the newspapers were full of it at the time. You 
didn’t know that it all took place under my eyes? I can 
scarcely believe now that it did : it all seems so distant, 
vivid but unreal, like a thing of my own invention. It 
really was much stranger than any one guessed. People 
could no more understand it than they could understand 
her. I doubt whether any one ever understood Alice Oke 
besides myself. You mustn’t think me unfeeling. She 
was a marvelous, weird, exquisite creature, but one 
couldn’t feel sorry for her. I felt much sorrier for the 
wretched creature of a husband. It seemed such an ap- 
propriate end for her; I fancy she would have liked it 
could she have known. Ah ! I shall never have another 
chance of painting such a portrait as I wanted. She 
seemed sent me from heaven or the other place. You 
have never heard the story in detail? Well, I don’t usu- 
ally mention it, because people are so brutally stupid or 
sentimental; but I’ll tell it you. Let me see. It’s too 
dark to paint any more to-day, so I can tell it you now. 
Wait, I must turn her face to the wall. Ah, she was a 
marvelous creature ! 


CHAPTER I. 

You remember, three years ago, my telling you I had let 
myself in for painting a couple of Kentish squireen? I 
really could not understand what had possessed me to say 
yes to that man. A friend of mine had brought him one 
day to my studio. Mr. Oke, of Okehurst, that was the 
name on his card. He was a very tall, very well-made, 
very good-looking young man, with a beautiful fair com- 
plexion, beautiful fair moustache, and beautifully fitting 
clothes ; absolutely like a hundred other young men you 
can see any day in the park, and absolutely uninteresting 
from the crown of his head to the tip of his boots. Mr. 
Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the guards before his 
marriage, was evidently extremely uncomfortable on find 
ing himself in a studio. He felt misgivings about a man 
who could wear a velvet coat in town, but at the same time 
he was nervously anxious not to treat me in the very least 
like a tradesman. He walked round my place, looked at 
everything with the most scrupulous attention, stammered 
out a few complimentary phrases, and then, looking at his 
friend for assistance, tried to come to the point but failed. 
The point, which the friend kindly explained, was that 
Mr. Oke was desirous to know whether my engagements 
would allow of my painting him and his wife, and what 
my terms would be. The poor man blushed perfectly 
crimson during this explanation, as if he had come with 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


3 


the most improper proposal ; and I noticed — the only inter- 
esting thing about him — a very odd nervous frown between 
his eyebrows, a perfect double gash— a thing that usually 
means something abnormal; a mad-doctor of my acquaint- 
ance calls it the maniac frown. When I had answered, 
lie suddenly burst out into rather confused explanations, 
his wife — Mrs. Oke— had seen some of my — pictures — paint- 
ings — portraits — at the— the — what d’you call it?— Acad- 
emy. She had — in short, they had made a very great im- 
pression upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for art ; she 
was, in short, extremely desirous of having her portrait 
and his painted by me, et cetera. 

‘ 4 My wife, ’ ’ he suddenly added, “ is a remarkable woman. 
I don’t know whether you will think her handsome— she 
isn't exactly, you know. But she’s awfully strange,” and 
Mr. Oke, of Okehurst, gave a little sigh and frowned that 
curious frown, as if so long a speech and so decided an ex- 
pression of opinion had cost him a great deal. 

It was a rather unfortunate moment in my career. A 
very influential sitter of mine — you remember the fat lady 
with the crimson curtain behind her? — had come to the 
conclusion or been persuaded that I had painted her old 
and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had 
turned against me, the newspapers had taken up the mat- 
ter, and for the moment I was considered as a painter to 
whose brushes no woman would trust her reputation. 
Things were going badly. So I snapped but too gladly at 
Mr. Oke’s offer, and settled to go down to Okehurst at the 
end of a fortnight. But the door had scarcely closed upon 
my future sitter when I began to regret my rashness ; and 
my disgust at the thought of wasting a whole summer 
upon the portrait of a totally uninteresting Kentish squire, 
and his doubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater 
and greater as the time for execution approached. I re- 
member so well the frightful temper in which I got into 
the train for Kent, and the even more frightful temper 
in which I got out of it at the little station nearest 
to Okehurst. It was pouring floods. I felt a comfort- 
able fury at the thought that my canvases would get 
nicely wetted before Mr. Oke’s coachman had packed them 
on the top of the wagonette. It was just what served me 
right for coming to this confounded place to paint these 
confounded people. We drove off in the steady downpour. 
The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless, flat 
grazing-grounds under the oak trees, after having been 
burned to cinders in a long drought, were turned into a 
hideous brown sop ; the country seemed intolerably monot- 
onous. 

M^y spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate 


4 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


upon the modern Gothic country-house, with the usual 
amount of Morris furniture, Liberty rugs, and Mudie nov- 
els, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy pict- 
ured very vividly the five or six little Okes — that man cer- 
tainly must have at least five children— the aunts and 
sisters-in-law and cousins ; the eternal routine of afternoon 
tea and lawn- tennis ; above all, it pictured Mrs. Oke, the 
bouncing, well-informed, model housekeeper, electioneer- 
ing, charity organizing young woman, whom such an indi- 
vidual as Mr. Oke would regard in the light of a remark- 
able woman. And my spirit sank within me, and I cursed 
my avarice in accepting the commission, my spiritlessness 
in not throwing it over while yet there was time. We had 
meanwhile driven into a large park, or rather a long suc- 
cession of grazing grounds, dotted about with large oaks, 
under which the sheep were huddled together for shelter 
from the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of 
rain, was a line of low hills, Avith a jagged fringe of bluish 
firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a 
half since we had passed a house, and there was none to be 
seen in the distance, nothing but the undulation of sere 
grass, sopped broAvn beneath the huge, blackish oak-trees, 
and Avhence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate 
bleating. At last the road made a sudden bend, and dis- 
closed Avhat was evidently the home of my sitter. It Avas 
not Avhat I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large 
red-brick house, Avith the rounded gables and high chim- 
ney-stacks of the time of James I. — a forlorn, vast place, 
set in the midst of the pasture-land, with no trace of gar- 
den before it, and only a few large trees indicating the pos- 
sibility of one to the hack ; no laAvn either, but on the other 
side of the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a 
huge oak, short, holloAv, with wreathing, blasted, black 
branches, upon which only a handful of leaves shook in the 
rain. It Avas not at all what I had pictured to myself the 
home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst. 

My host received me in the hall, a large place, paneled 
and carved, hung round with portraits up to its curious 
ceiling— vaulted and ribbed like the inside of a ship’s hull. 
He looked even more blonde and pink-and- white, more ab- 
solutely mediocre, in his tweed suit ; and also, I thought, 
even more good-natured and duller. He took me into his 
study, a room hung round with whips and fishing-tackle 
in place of books, Avhile my things were being carried up- 
stairs. It was very damp, and a fire Avas smoldering. 
He gave the embers a nervous kick Avith his foot, and said, 
as he offered me a cigar : 

“You must excuse my not introducing you at once to 


A PHANTOM LOVER. , 5 

Mrs. Oke. My wife — in short, I believe my wifi is 
asleep.” 

“ Is Mrs. Oke unwell?” I asked, a sudden hope flashing 
across me that I might be off the whole matter. 

“Oh, no; Alice is quite well— at least, quite as well as 
she usually is. My wife,” he added, after a minute, and 
in a very decided tone, “ does not enjoy very good health 
—a nervous constitution. Oh, no, not at all ill, nothing at 
all serious, you know. Only nervous, the doctors say; 
mustn’t be worried or excited, the doctors say; requires 
lots of repose — that sort of thing.” 

There was a dead pause. This man depressed me, I knew 
not why. He had a listless, puzzled look, very much out 
of keeping with his evident admirable health and strength. 

“ I suppose you are a great sportsman?” I asked, from 
sheer despair, nodding in the direction of the whips and 
guns and fishing-rods. 

“Oh, no, not now. I was once. I have given up all 
that,” he answered, standing with his back to the fire, and 
staring at the polar bear beneath his feet. “ I— I have no 
time for all that now,” he added, as if an explanation were 
due. “A married man — you know. Would you like to 
come up to your rooms?” he suddenly interrupted himself. 
‘ ‘ I have had one arranged for you to paint in. My wife 
said you would prefer a north light. If that one doesn’t 
suit, you can have your choice of any other.” 

I followed him out of the study, through the vast en- 
trance-hall. In less than a minute I was no longer think- 
ink of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the boredom of doing their 
likenesses— I was simply overcome by the beauty of this 
house, Avhich I had pictured modern and Philistine. It 
was, ^without exception, the most perfect example of an 
old English manor-house that I had ever seen ; the most 
magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably pre- 
served. Out of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace 
of delicately carved and inlaid gray and black stone, and 
its rows of family portraits, reaching from the wainscot- 
ing to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship’s 
hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet 
surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the Avail 
covered with oak carvings of coats-of-arms, leafage, and 
little mythological scenes, painted a faded red-and-blue, 
and picked out Avith tarnished gold, Avhich harmonized 
with the tarnished blue-and-gold of the stamped leather 
that reached to the oak cornice, again delicately tinted and 
gilded. The beautifully damascened suits of court armor 
looked, Avithout being at all rusty, as if no modern hand 
had ever touched them ; the very rugs under foot Avere of 
sixteenth-century Persian make; the only things of to-day 


6 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


were the big bunches of flowers and ferns, arranged in 
majolica dishes upon the landings. Everything was per- 
fectly silent; only from below came the chimes, silvery 
like an Italian palace fountain, of an old-fashioned clock. 

It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace 
of the Sleeping Beauty. 

“ What a magnificent house!’ 1 I exclaimed, as I followed 
my host through a long corridor, also hung with leather, 
wainscoted with carvings, and furnished with big wedding 
coffers, and chairs that looked as if they came out of some 
Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong im- 
pression that all this was natural, spontaneous — that it had 
about it nothing of the picturesqueness which swell studios 
have taught to rich and aesthetic houses. Mr. Oke mis- 
understood me. 

“ It is a nice old place,” he said, “ but it’s too large for 
us. You see, my wife’s health does not allow of our having 
many guests; and there are no children.” 

I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice ; and 
he evidently was afraid there might have seemed some- 
thing of the kind, for he added, immediately ; 

“I don’t care for children one jackstraw, you know, 
myself; can’t understand how any one can, for my part.” 

If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, I said to 
myself, Mr. Oke of Okehurst was doing so at the present 
moment. 

When he had left me in one of the two engmious rooms 
that were allotted to me, I threw myself into &n arm-chair 
and tried to focus the extraordinary imaginative impression 
which this house had given me. 

I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides 
the sort of spasm of imaginative interest sometimes given 
to me by certain rare and eccentric personalities, I know 
nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter, and less 
analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common- 
run sort of house. To sit in a room like the one I was sit- 
ting in, with the figures of the tapestry glimmering gray 
and lilac and purple in the twilight, the great bed, col- 
umned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the em- 
bers reddening beneath the overhanging mantel- piece of 
inlaid Italian stonework, a vague scent of rose-leaves and 
spices, put into the china bowls by the hands of ladies long 
since dead, filling the room, while the clock down-stairs 
sent up, every now and then, its faint, silvery tune of for- 
gotten days— to do this is a special kind of voluptuous- 
ness, peculiar and complex and indescribable, like the half - 
drunkenness of opium or hashish, and which, to be con- 
veyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a 
genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire. 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


7 


After I had dressed for dinner, I resumed my place in 
the arm-chair, and resumed also my reverie, letting all 
these impressions of the past - which seemed faded like the 
figures in the arras, but still warm like the embers in the 
fireplace, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of the dead 
rose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls— permeate 
me and go to my head. Of Oke and Oke’s wife I did not 
think ; I seemed quite alone, isolated from the world, sep- 
arated from it in this exotic enjoyment. 

Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the 
tapestry more shadowy ; the columned and curtained bed 
loomed out vaguer; the room seemed to fill with gray ness; 
and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bay-window, be- 
yond whose panes, between whose heavy stonework, 
stretched a grayish-brown expanse of sere and sodden park 
grass, dotted with big, oaks, while far off, behind a jagged 
fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was suffused with 
the blood-red of the sunset. Between the falling of the 
raindrops from the ivy outside there came, fainter or 
sharper, the recurring bleating of the lambs separated from 
their mothers, a forlorn, quavering, eerie little cry. 

I started up at a sudden rap at my door. 

“Haven’t you heard the gong for dinner?” asked Mr. 
Oke’s voice. 

I had completely forgotten his existence. 


CHAPTER II. 

I feel that I cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest im- 
pressions of Mrs. Oke. My recollection of them would be 
entirely colored by my subsequent knowledge of her; 
whence I conclude that I could not at first have experienced 
the strange interest and admiration which that extraordi- 
nary woman very soon excited in me. Interest and ad- 
miration, be it well understood, of a very unusual kind, as 
she was herself a very unusual kind of woman; and I, if 
you choose, am a rather unusual kind of a man. But I 
can explain that better anon. 

This much is certain, that I must have been immeasur- 
ably surprised at finding my hostess and future sitter so 
completely unlike everything I had anticipated. Or, no — 
now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt surprised at all ; 
or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but an 
infinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that having 
once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible 
to remember that one could have fancied her at all differ- 
ent; there was something so complete, so completely unlike 
every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always 


8 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


to have been present in one's consciousness,' although pres- 
ent, perhaps, as an enigma. 

Let me try and give you some notion of her ; not that 
first impression, whatever it may have been, but the abso- 
lute reality of her as I gradually learned to see it. To begin 
with, I must repeat and reiterate over and over again, 
that she was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and 
exquisite woman I have ever seen, out with a grace and an 
exquisiteness that had nothing to do with any preconceived 
notion or previous experience of what goes by these names ; 
grace and exquisiteness recognized at once as perfect, but 
which were seen in her for the first, and probably, I do be- 
lieve, for the last time. 

It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand years 
there may arise a combination of lines, a system of move- 
ments, an outline, a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, 
and yet hits off exactly our desires for beauty and ‘rare- 
ness? She was very tall, and I suppose people would have 
called her thin. I don’t know, for I never thought about 
her as a body — bones, flesh, that sort of thing— but merely 
as a wonderful series of lines, and a wonderful strangeness 
of personality. Tall and slender, certainly, and with not 
one item of what makes up our notion of a well-built 
woman. She was as straight — I mean she had as little of 
what people call figure — as a bamboo ; her shoulders were 
a trifle high, and she had a decided stoop ; her arms and 
her shoulders she never once wore uncovered. But this 
bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness and a stateliness, a 
play of outline with every step she took, that I can’t com- 
pare to anything else; there was in it something of the 
peacock and something also of the stag ; but above all, it 
was her own., I wish I could describe her. I wish, alas ! 
— I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundred thousand times — 
I could paint her, as I see her now if I shut my eyes — even 
if it were only a silhouette. 

There ! I see her so plainly, walking slowly up and down 
a room, the slight highness of her shoulders just complet- 
ing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straight, 
supple back, the long, exquisite neck, the head, with the 
hair cropped in short pale curls, always drooping a little, 
except when she would suddenly throw it back and smile, 
not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything that had been 
said, but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard some- 
thing. with the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, 
and the strange whiteness in her full, wide opened eyes; 
the moment when she had something of the stag in her 
movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I 
don’t believe, you know, that even the greatest painter 
can show what is the real J^eauty of a very beautiful 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


0 

woman in the ordinary sense; Titian’s and Tintoretto's 
women must have been miles handsomer than they have 
made them. Something— and that the very essence — al 
ways escapes, perhaps because real beauty is as much a 
thing in time— a thing like music, a succession, a series — 
as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beauti- 
ful in the conventional sense. Imagine, then, how much 
more so in the case of a woman like Alice Oke ; and if the 
pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint, can’t succeed, 
how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with 
mere wretched words — words possessing only a wretched 
abstract meaning, an important conventional association? 
To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke of Okehurst was, in - 
my opinion, to the highe'st degree exquisite and strange — 
an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe 
than you could bring home the perfume of some newly - 
discovered tropical flower by comparing it with the scent 
of a cabbage rose or a lily. 

That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke — Oke of 
Okehurst, as the people down there called him— was horri- 
bly shy, consumed with a fear of making a fool of himself 
before me and his wife, I then thought. But that sort of 
shyness did not wear off ; and I soon discovered that, at 
though it was doubtless increased by the presence of a 
total stranger, it was inspired in Oke, not by me, but by 
his wife. He would look every now and then as if he 
were going to make a remark, and then evidently restrain 
himself, and remain silent. It was very curious to see this 
huge, handsome, manly young fellow, who ought to have 
had any amount of success! with women, suddenly stam- 
mer and grow crimson iry the presence of his own wife. 
Nor was it the consciousness of stupidity ; for when you 
got him alone, Oke, although always slow and timid, had 
a certain amount of ideas, and very defined political and 
social views, and a certain childlike earnestness and desire 
to attain certainty and truth which was rather touching. 
On the other hand, Oke’s singular shyness was not, so far 
as I could see, the result of any kind of bullying on his 
wife’s part. You can always detect, if you have any ob 
servation, the husband or the wife who is accustomed to 
be snubbed, to be corrected, by his or her better half; 
there is a consciousness in both parties, a habit of watch 
ing and fault-finding, of being watched and found fault 
with. This was clearly not the case at Okehurst. Mrs. 
Oke evidently did not trouble herself about her husband 
in the very least : he might say or do any amount of silly 
things without rebuke or even notice; and he might have 
done so, had he chosen, ever since his wedding-day. You 
felt that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over his exist- 


10 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


ence. I cannot say she paid much attention to any one’s, 
even to mine. At first I thought it an affectation on her 
part — for there was something far-fetched in her whole 
appearance, something suggesting study, which might 
lead one to tax her with affectation at first; she was 
dressed in a strange way — not according to any established 
aesthetic eccentricity, but individually strangely, as if* in 
the clothes of an ancestress of the seventeenth century. 
Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on her part— the 
mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference 
which she manifested toward me. She always seemed to be 
thinking of something else ; and although she talked quite 
sufficiently, and with every sign of superior intelligence, 
she left the impression of having been as taciturn as her 
husband. 

In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Oke- 
hurst, I imagined that Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort 
of flirt ; and that her absent manner, her look, while speak 
ing to you, into an invisible distance, her curious irrele- 
vant smile, were so many means of attracting ana baffling 
adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners 
of certain foreign women — it is beyond English ones— which 
mean, to those who can understand, ‘‘Pay court to me.” 
But I soon found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not the 
faintest desire that I should pay court to her, indeed she 
did not honor me with sufficient thought for that; and I, 
on my part, began to be too much interested in her from 
another point of view to dream of such a thing. I became 
aware, not merely that I had before me the most marvel 
ously rare and exquisite and baffling subject for a portrait, 
but also one of the most peculiar and enigmatic of charac- 
ters. Now that I look back upon it, I am tempted to think 
that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be 
summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in her- 
self— a Narcissus attitude — curiously complicated with a 
fantastic imagination, a sort of morbid day-dreaming, all 
turned inward, and with no outer characteristic save a 
certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, 
to surprise and shock more particularly her husband, and 
thus be revenged for the intense boredom which his pres- 
ence evidently inflicted upon her. 

I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did 
not seem to have really penetrated the something myste 
rious about Mrs. Oke ; there was a waywardness, a strange- 
ness, which I felt but could not explain — a something as 
difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appear 
ance, and perhaps very closely connected therewith. I 
became interested in Mrs. Oke as if I had been in love with 
her, and I was not in the l§ast in love. I neither -dreaded 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


11 


parting from her nor felt any pleasure in her presence. I 
had not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. 
But I had her on the brain ; I pursued her, her physical 
image, her psychological explanation, with a kind or pas- 
sion which filled my days, and prevented my ever feeling 
dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There 
wei;e but few neighbors, of whom they saw but little ; and 
they rarely had a guest in the house. Oke himself seemed 
every now and then seized with a sense of responsibility 
toward me. He would remark vaguely, during our walks 
and after dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst 
horribly dull; his wife’s health had accustomed him to 
solitude, and then, also, his wife thought the neighbors a 
bore. He never questioned his wife’s judgment in these 
matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were 
quite simple and inevitable: yet it seemed to me, some- 
times, that this monotonous lire of solitude, by the side of 
a woman who took no more heed of him than of a table or 
chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation in 
this young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, com- 
monplace life. I often wondered how he could endure it 
at all, not having, as I had, the interest of a strange psy- 
chological riddle to solve, and of a great portrait to paint. 
He was, I found, extremely good — the type of the perfectly 
conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who 
ought to have been the Christian-soldier kind of thing : de- 
vout, pure-minded, brave, incapable of any baseness, a lit- 
tle intellectually dense, and puzzled by all manner of moral 
scruples. 

The condition of his tenants and of his political party — 
he was a regular Kentish Tory — lay heavy on his mind. 
He spent hours every day in his study, doing the work of 
a land agent and a political whip, reading piles of reports 
and newspapers and agricultural treatises, and emerging 
for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, and that odd, 
puzzled look in his good, healthy face, that deep gash 
between his eyebrows which my friend the mad-doctor 
calls the maniac-frown. It was with this expression of 
face that I should have liked to paint him ; but I felt that 
he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to 
represent him in his more wholesome pink-and-wdute blond 
conventionality. I was, perhaps, rather unconscientious 
about the likeness of Mr. Oke ; I felt satisfied to paint it 
no matter how, I mean as regards character, for my whole 
mind was swallowed up in thinking how I should paint 
Mrs. Oke, how r I could best transport on to canvas that 
singular and enigmatic personality. I began with her hus- 
band, and told her frankly that I must have much longer 
to study her. Mr. Oke couldn’t understand why it should 


12 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil sketches 
of his wife before even determining in what attitude to 
paint her ; but I think he was rather pleased to have an 
opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst — my presence evi- 
dently broke the monotony of Jiis life. Mrs. Oke seemed 
perfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly 
indifferent to my presence. Without being rude, I never 
saw a woman pay so little attention to a guest ; she would 
talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let me talk 
to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie 
back in a big seventeenth-century arm-chair while I played 
the piano, with that strange smile every now and then in 
her thin cheeks, that strange whiteness in her eyes ; but it 
seemed a matter of indifference whether my music stopped 
or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not 
take, or pretend to take, the very faintest interest ; but 
that was nothing to me. I didn’t want Mrs. Oke to think 
me interesting : I merely wished to go on studying her. 

The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all 
aware of my presence as distinguished from that of the 
chairs and tables, the dogs that lay in the porch, or the 
clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbor who was occasion- 
ally asked to dinner, was one day — I might have been there 
a week— when I chanced to remark to her upon the very 
singular resemblance that existed between herself and the 
portrait of a lady that hung in the hall with the ceiling 
like a ship’s hull. The picture in question was a fuJl-length, 
neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some 
stray Italian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in 
a rather dark corner, facing the portrait, evidently painted 
to be its companion, of a dark man, with a somewhat un- 
pleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in a black 
Yandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; 
and in the corner of the woman’s portrait were the words: 
“ Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, Esq., and wife to 
Nicholas Oke of Okehurst,” and the date 1626 —” Nicholas 
Oke ” being the name painted in the corner of the small 
portrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present 
Mrs. Oke, at least so far as an indifferently-painted por- 
trait of the early days of Charles I. can be like a living 
woman of the nineteenth century. There were the same 
strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the 
thin cheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague 
eccentricity of expression, not destroyed even by the feeble 
painting and the conventional manner of the time. One 
could fancy that this woman had the same walk, the same 
beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as 
her descendant, for I found that Mr. and Mrs. Oke, who 
were first cousins, were both descended from that Nicholas 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


13 


Oke and that Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret. But the 
resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soon saw, 
the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like 
her ancestress, dressing in garments that had a sevententh- 
century look ; nay, that were sometimes absolutely copied 
from this portrait. 

“ You think I am like her, ” answered Mrs. Oke, dreamily, 
to my remark, and her eyes wandered off to that unseen 
something, and the faint smile dimpled her thin cheeks. 

“You are like her, and you know it. I may even say you 
wish to be like her, Mrs. Oke, ’ ’ I answered, laughing. 

“ Perhaps I do.” 

And she looked in the direction of her husband. I no- 
ticed that he had an expression of distinct annoyance be- 
sides that frown of his. 

‘ 4 Isn’t it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like that por- 
trait?” I asked, with a perverse curiosity. 

“Oh, fudge!” he exclaimed, rising from his chair and 
walking nervously to the window. “It’s all nonsense, 
mere nonsense. I wish you wouldn’t, Alice.” 

“Wouldn’t what ?” asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort of con- 
temptuous indifference. “If I am like that Alice Oke, 
why I am ; and I am very pleased any one should think 
so. She and her husband are just about the only two mem- 
bers of our family — our most flat, stale, and unprofitable 
family — that ever were in the least degree interesting.” 

Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain. 

“ I don’t see why you should abuse our family, Alice,” 
he said! “ Thank God, our people have always been hon- 
orable and upright men and women!” 

“ Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice his wife, 
daughter of Virgil Pomfret, Esq.,” she answered, laughing, 
as he strode out into the park. 

“How childish he is!” she exclaimed, when we were 
alone. “ He really minds, really feels disgraced by what 
our ancestors did two centuries and a half ago. I do be- 
lieve William would have those two portraits taken down 
and burned, if he weren’t afraid of me and ashamed of the 
neighbors. And as it is, these two people really are the 
only two members of our family that ever were in the least 
interesting. I will tell you the story some day.” 

As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The 
next day, as we were taking our morning walk, he sud- 
denly broke a long silence, laying about him all the time 
at the sear grass with the hooked stick that he carried, 
like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose 
of cutting down his and other folks’ thistles. 

“ I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered to- 


14 A PHANTOM LOVER . 

ward my wife yesterday,” he said, shyly; “ and, indeed, I 
know I was. ’ ’ 

Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every 
woman, everv wife— and his own most of all — appeared in 
the light of something holy. “ But— but— I have a preju- 
dice which my wife does not enter into, about raking up 
ugly things in one’s own family. I suppose Alice thinks 
that it is so long ago that it has really got no connection 
with us , she thinks of it merely as a picturesque story. I 
dare say many people feel like that ; in short, I am sure 
they do, otherwise there wouldn’t be such lots of discredit- 
able family traditions afloat. But I feel as if it were all 
one whether it were long ago or not; when it’s a question 
of one’s own people, I would rather have it forgotten. I 
can’t understand how people can talk about murders in 
their families, and ghosts, and so forth.” 

“Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?” I 
asked. The place seemed as if it required some to com- 
plete it. 

“ I hope not,” answered Oke, gravely. 

His gravity made me smile. 

“ Wliy, would you dislike it if there were?” I asked. 

“If there are such things as ghosts,” he replied, “I 
don’t think they should be taken lightly. God would not 
permit them to be, except as a warning or a punishment. ’ ’ 

We walked on some time in silence, I wondering at 
the strange type of this commonplace young man, and 
half wishing I could put something into my portrait that 
should be the equivalent of this curious, unimaginative 
earnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two 
pictures— told it me about as badly and hesitatingly as was 
possible for mortal man. 

He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and there- 
fore descended from the same old Kentish stock. The 
Okes of Okehurst could* trace back to Norman, almost to 
Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled or better- 
known families of the neighborhood. I saw that William 
Oke, in his heart, thoroughly looked down upon all his 
neighbors. “We have never done anything particular, or 
been anything particular — never held any office.” he said; 
‘ 1 but we have always been here, and apparently always 
done our duty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the 
Scotch wars, another at Agincourt — mere honest cap- 
tains. ’ ’ 

Well, early in the seventeeth century, the family had 
dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who 
had rebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas 
appears to have been somewhat different from the usual 
run of the family. He had, in his youth, sought advent- 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


15 


ures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have 
been less of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, 
when no longer very young, Alice, daughter of Virgil 
Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from a neighboring 
county. “It was the first time an Oke married a Pom- 
fret,” my host informed me, “and the last time. The 
Pomfrets were quite different sort of people-restless, self- 
seeking; one of them had been a favorite of Henry VIII.” 
It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having 
any Pomfret blood in his veins ; he spoke of these people 
with an evident family dislike — the dislike of an Oke, one 
of the old, honorable, modest stock, which had quietly 
done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and court 
minions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in 
a little house recently inherited from an uncle, a certain 
Christopher Lovelock, a young gallant and poet, who was 
in momentary disgrace at court for some love affair. This 
Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neigh- 
bors of Okehurst — too great a friendship, apparently, with 
the wife, either for her husband’s sake or her own. Any- 
how, one evening, as he was riding home alone, Lovelock 
had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highway- 
men, but, as was afterward rumored, by Nicholas Oke, ac- 
companied by his wife, dressed as a groom. No legal evi- 
dence had been got, but the tradition had remained. 

1 k They used to tell it us when we were children, ’ ’ said my 
host, in a hoarse voice, ‘ ‘ and to frighten my cousin— I mean 
my wife — and me with stories about Lovelock. It is merely 
a tradition, which I hope may die out, as I sincerely pray 
to Heaven that it may be false. Alice — Mrs. Oke— you see, ’ ’ 
he went on after some time, “doesn’t feel about it as I do. 
Perhaps I am morbid. But I do dislike having the old 
story raked up.” 

And we said no more on the subject. 


CHAPTER III. 

FRom that moment I began to assume a certain interest 
in the eyes of Mrs. Oke ; or, rather, I began to perceive that 
I had a means of securing her attention. Perhaps it was 
wrong of me to do so ; and I have often reproached myself 
very seriously later on. But, after all, how was I to guess 
that I was making mischief merely by chiming in, for the 
sake of the portrait I had undertaken, and of a very harm- 
less psychological mania, with what was me rely the fad, the 
little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of a scatter- 
brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world 
should I have dreamed that I was handling explosive sub- 
stances? A man is surely not responsible if the people 


16 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he deals with as 
with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all 
other human creatures. 

So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really can- 
not blame myself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique 
subject for a portrait-painter of any particular sort, and a 
most singular, bizarre personality. I could not possibly do 
my subject justice so long as I was kept at a distance, pre- 
vented from studying the real character of the woman. I 
required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any 
more innocent way of doing so could be found than talking 
to a woman, and letting her talk, about an absurd fancy 
she had for a couple of ancestors of hers of the time of 
Charles I. and a poet whom they had murdered? — particu- 
larly, as I studiously respected the prejudices of my host, 
and refrained from mentioning the matter, and tried to 
restrain Mrs. Oke from doing so, in the presence of William 
Oke himself ? 

I had certainly guessed correctly. To resemble the Alice 
Oke of the year 1626 was the caprice, the mania, the pose, 
the whatever you may call it, of the Alice Oke of 1880 ; and 
to perceive this resemblance was the sure way of gaining 
her good graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of 
all the extraordinary crazes of childless and idle women, 
that I had ever met ; but it was more than that, it was ad- 
mirably characteristic. It finished off the strange figure 
of Mrs. Oke as I saw it in my imagination — this bizarre 
creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness — that she 
should have no interest in the present, but only an eccen- 
tric passion in the past. It seemed to give the meaning to 
the absent look in her eyes, to her irrelevant and far-off 
smile. It was like the words to a weird piece of gypsy 
music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from 
all women of her own time, should try and identify herself 
with a woman of the past — that she should have a kind of 
flirtation But of this anon. 

I told Mrs. Oke that I had learned from her husband the 
outline of the tragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of 
Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, and the poet, 
Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, of a 
desire to shock, which I had noticed before, came into her 
beautiful, pale, diaphanous face. 

4 ‘ I suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole 
matter,” she said— “ told it to you with as little detail as 
possible, and assured you very solemnly that he hoped the 
whole story might be a mere dreadful calumny? Poor 
Willie! I remember already when we were children, and 
I used to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Oke- 
hurst, and my cousin was down here for his holidays, how 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


17 


I used to horrify him by insisting upon dressing up in 
shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of the 
wicked Mrs. Oke; and he alwavs piously refused to do the 
part of Nicholas, when I wanted to have the scene on Cotes 
Common. I didn’t know then that I was like the original 
Alice Oke; I found it out only after our marriage. You 
really think that I am?” 

She certainly was, particularly at that moment, as she 
stood in a white Vandyck dress, with the green of the park 
land rising up behind her, and the low sun catching her 
short locks and surrounding her head, her exquisitely 
bowed head, with a pale yellow halo. But I confess I 
thought the original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though 
she might be, very uninteresting compared with this way- 
ward and exquisite creature whom I had rashly promised 
myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikely, way- 
ward exquisiteness. 

One morning while Mr. Oke was dispatching his Satur- 
day heap of conservative manifestoes and rural decisions 
— he was justice of the peace in a most literal sense, pene- 
trating into cottages and huts, defending the weak and ad- 
monishing the ill-conducted — one morning while I was mak- 
ing one of my many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that 
remain to me now !) of my future sitter, Mrs. Oke gave me 
her version of the story of Alice Oke and Christopher Love- 
lock. 

“ Do you suppose there was anything between them?”“ I 
asked—' ' that she was ever in love with him? How do you 
explain the part which tradition ascribes to her in the sup- 
posed murder? One has heard of women and their lovers 
who have killed the husband ; but a woman who combines 
with her husband to kill her lover, or at least the man who 
is in love with her— that is surely very singular.” I was 
absorbed in my drawing, and really thinking very little of 
what I was saying. 

“ I don’t know,” she answered, pensively, with that dis- 
tant look in her eyes. ‘ * Alice Oke was very proud, I am 
sure. She may have loved the poet very much, and yet 
been indignant with him, hated having to love him. She 
may have felt that she had a right to rid herself of him, 
and to call upon her husband to help her to do so.” 

“Good heavens! What a fearful idea!” I exclaimed, 
half laughing. “ Don’t you think, after all, that Mr. Oke 
may be right in saying that it is easier and more comfort- 
able to take the whole story as a pure invention?” 

“I cannot take it as an invention,” answered Mrs. Oke, 
contemptuously, ‘ ‘ because I happen to know that it is 
true.” 

“Indeed!” I answered, working away at my sketch, and 


18 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


enjoying putting this strange creature, as I said to myself, 
through her paces; “how is that?” 

“How does one know that anything is true in this 
world?” she replied, evasively; “ because one does, because 
one feels it to be true, I suppose.” 

And, with that far-off look in her light eyes, she relapsed 
into silence. 

“ Have you ever read any of Lovelock’s poetry?” she 
asked me suddenly, the next day. 

“Lovelock?” I answered, for I had forgotten the name. 

‘/Lovelock, who ” But I stopped, remembering the 

prejudices of my host, who was seated next to me at table. 

“ Lovelock who was killed by Mr. Oke’s and my ances- 
tors. ’ ’ 

And she looked full at her husband, as if in perverse en- 
joyment of the evident annoyance which it caused him. 

“Alice,” he entreated, in a low voice, his whole face 
crimson, “ for mercy’s sake, don’t talk about such things 
before the servants.” 

Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hysterical laugh, 
the laugh of a naughty child. 

“ The servants! Gracious heavens, do you suppose they 
haven’t heard the story? Why, it’s as well known as 
Okehurst itself in the neighborhood. Don’t they believe 
that Lovelock has been seen about the house? Haven’t 
they all heard his footsteps in the big corridor? Haven’t 
they, my dear Willie, noticed a thousand times that you 
never will stay a minute alone in the yellow drawing-room 
— that you run out of it, like a child, if I happen to leave 
you there for a minute?” 

True! How was it I had not noticed that? or, rather, 
that I only now remembered having noticed it? The yel- 
low drawing-room was one of the most charming rooms 
in the house; a large, bright room, hung with yellow 
damask and paneled with carvings, that opened straight 
out on to the lawn, far superior to the room in which we 
habitually sat, which was comparatively gloomy. This 
time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. I felt an 
intense desire to badger him. 

“The yellow drawing-room!” I exclaimed. “ Does this 
interesting literary character haunt the yellow drawing- 
room? Do tell me about it? What happened there?” 

Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh. 

“Nothing ever happened there, so far as I know,” he 
said, and rose from the table. 

“Really?” I asked, incredulously. 

“ Nothing did happen there,” answered Mrs. Oke, slowly, 
playing mechanically with a fork, and picking out the 
pattern of the table-cloth. ‘ ‘ That is just the extraordinary 


A PHANTOM ft OVER. 


19 


circumstance, that, so far as any one knows, nothing ever 
did happen there ; and yet that room has an evil reputa- 
tion. No member of our family, they say, can bear to sit 
there alone for more than a minute. You see, William 
evidently cannot. 1 ’ 

“ Have you ever seen or heard anything strange there?” 
I asked my host. 

He shook his head. “ Nothing,” he answered, curtly, 
and lit his cigar. 

‘ 4 1 presume you have not, ’ ’ I asked, half laughing, of 
Mrs. Oke, 44 since you don't mind sitting in that room for 
hours alone? How do you explain this uncanny reputa- 
tion, since nothing ever happened there?” 

44 Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the 
future,” she answered, in her absent voice. And then she 
suddenly added, “Suppose you paint my portrait in that 
room?” 

Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very white, 
and looked as if he were going to say something," but de- 
sisted. 

44 Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that?” I asked, when 
he had gone into his smoking-room with his usual bundle 
of papers. “ It is very cruel of you, Mrs. Oke. You ought 
to have more consideration for people who believe in such 
things, although you may not be able to put yourself in 
their frame of mind. ’ ’ 

"“ Who tells you that I don’t believe in such things , as 
you call them?” she answered, abruptly. 

“Come,” she said, after a minute, “ I want to show you 
why I believe in Christopher Lovelock. Come with me 
into the yellow room. ’ ’ 


CHAPTER IV. 

What Mrs. Oke showed me in the yellow-room was a 
large bundle of papers, some printed and some manuscript, 
but all of them brown with age, which she took out of an 
old Italian ebony inlaid cabinet. It took her some time fo 
get them, as a complicated arrangement of double locks 
and false drawers had to be putin play; and, while she 
was doing so, I looked round the room, in which I had been 
only three or four times before. It was certainly the most 
beautiful room in thi 3 beautiful house, and, as it seemed to 
me now, the most strange. It was long and low, with 
something that made you think of the cabin of a ship, with 
a great mullioned window that let in, as it were, a per- 
spective of the brownish-green park land, dotted with 
oaks, and sloping upward to the distant line of bluish firs 
against the horizon. The walls were hung with flowered 


20 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


damask, whose yellow, faded to brown, united with the 
reddish color of the carved wainscoting and the carved 
oaken beams. For the rest, it reminded me more of an 
Italian room than an English one. The furniture was Tus- 
can of the early seventeenth century, inlaid and carved : 
there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures by some 
Bolognese master on the walls ; and in a corner, among a 
stack of-dwarf orange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of 
exquisite curve and slenderness, with flowers and land- 
scapes painted upon its cover. In a recess was a shelf of 
old books, mainly English and Italian poets of the Eliza- 
bethan time ; and close by it, placed upon a Carved wed- 
ding-chest, a large and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The 
panes of the mullioned window were open, and yet the air 
seemed heavy with an indescribable heady perfume, not 
that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff that 
had lain for years among spices. 

“It is a beautiful room!” I exclaimed. “ I should aw- 
fully like to paint you in it but I had scarcely spoken the 
words when I felt I had done wrong. This woman’s hus- 
band could not bear the room, and it seemed to me vaguely 
as if he were right in detesting it. 

Mrs. Oke took no notic& of my exclamation, but beck- 
oned me to the table where she was standing sorting the 
papers. 

“Look!” she said, “ these aSre all poems by Christopher 
Lovelock;” and, touching the yellow papers with delicate 
and reverent fingers, she commenced reading some of them 
aloud in a slow, half -audible voice. They were songs in 
the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton, com- 
plaining for the most part of the cruelty of a iady called 
Dryope, in whose name was * evidently concealed a refer- 
ence to that of the mistress of Okehurst. The songs were 
graceful, and not without a certain faded passion ; but I 
was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was read- 
ing them to me. 

Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish-yellow wall as 
a. background to her white brocade dress, which, in its stiff, 
seventeenth- century make, seemed but to bring out more 
clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness of her tall 
figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the 
other, as if for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. 
Her voice, which was delicate, shadowy, like her person, 
had a curious throbbing cadence, as if she were reading the 
words of a melody, and restraining herself with difficulty 
from singing it ; and as she read, her long, slender throat 
throbbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin 
face. She evidently knew the verses by heart, and her 
eyes were mostly fixed with that distant smile in them, 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 21 

with which harmonized a constant tremulous little smile ' 
in her lips. 

“ That is how I would wish to paint her!” I exclaimed 
within myself ; and scarcely noticed, what struck me on 
thinking over the scene, that this strange being read these 
verses as one might fancy a woirran would read love verses 
addressed to herself. 

‘ ‘ Those are all written for Alice Oke— Alice, the daughter 
of Virgil Pomfret, ” she said, slowly, folding up the papers. 

“ I found them at the bottom of this cabinet. Can you 
doubt of the reality of Christopher Lovelock now?” 

The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the ex- 
istence of Christopher Lovelock was one thing, and to 
doubt of the mode of his death was another ; but somehow 
I did feel convinced. 

“ Look,” she said, when she had replaced the poems, “I 
will show you something else.” Among the flowers that 
stood on the upper story of her writing-table— for I found 
that Mrs. Oke had a writing-table in the yellow room- 
stood, as on an altar, a small ; black, carved frame, with a 
silk curtain drawn over it; the sort of thing behind which 
you would have expected to find a head of Christ or of the 
Virgin Mary. She drew the curtain and displayed a large- 
sized miniature, representing a“young man, with auburn 
curls and a peaked auburn beard,- dressed in black, but 
with lace about his neck, and large, pear-shaped pearls in 
his ears: a wistful, melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the 
miniature religiously off its stand, and showed me' written 
i .1 faded characters upon the back, the name “ Christopher 
Lovelock,” and the date 1626. 

1 * I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, to- 
gether with the heap of poems,” she said, taking the min- 
iature out of my hand. 

I was silent for a minute. 

“ Does— does Mr. Oke know that you have got it here?” I 
asked ; and then wondered what in the world had impelled 
me to put such a question. 

Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous indifference. 

“ I have never hidden it from any one. If my husband 
disliked my having it, he might have taken it away, I sup- 
pose. It belongs to him, since it was found in his house.” 

I did not answer, but walked mechanically toward the 
door. There was something heady and oppressive in this 
beautiful room ; something, I thought, almost repulsive in 
this exquisite woman. She seemed to me, suddenly, per- 
verse and dangerous. 

I scarcely know why, but I neglected Mrs. Oke that after- 
noon. I went to Mr. Oke’s study, and sat opposite to him 
smoking while he was engrossed in his accounts, his re- 


22 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


ports, and electioneering papers. On the table, above the 
heap of paper- bound volumes and pigeon-holed documents, 
was, as sole ornament of his den, a little photograph of his 
wife, done some years before. I don’t know why, but as I 
sat and watched him, with his florid, honest, manly beauty, 
working away conscientiously, with that little perplexed 
frown of his, I felt intensely sorry for this man. 

But this feeling did not last. There was no help for it ; 
Oke was not as interesting as Mrs. Oke ; and it required 
too great an effort to pump up sympathy for this normal, 
excellent, exemplary young squire, in the presence of so 
wonderful a creature as his wife. Bo I let myself go to the 
habit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over her strange 
craze, or rather of drawing her out about it. I confess 
that I derived a morbid and exquisite pleasure in doing so; 
it was so characteristic in her, so appropriate to the house ! 
It completed her personality so perfectly, and made it so 
much easier to conceive a way of painting her. I made up 
my mind, little by little, while working at William Oke’s 
portrait (he proved a less easy subject than I had anticipated, 
and, despite his conscientious efforts, was a nervous, un- 
comfortable sitter, silent and brooding) — I made up my 
mind that I would paint Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet 
in the yellow room, in the white Yandyck dress copied 
from the portrait of her ancestress. Mr. Oke might resent 
it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it; they might refuse to 
take the picture, to pay for it, to allow me to exhibit ; they 
might force me to run my umbrella through the picture. 
No matter. That picture should be painted, if merely for 
the sake of having painted it ; for I felt it was the only 
thing I could do, and that it would be far away my best 
work. I told neither of my resolution, but prepared 
sketch after sketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to paint 
her husband. 

Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even than her 
husband, for she did not feel bound, as he did, to attempt 
to entertain a guest or to show any interest in him. She 
seemed to spend her life — a curious, inactive, half-invalid- 
ish life, broken by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness — in 
an eternal day dream, strolling about the house and 
grounds, arranging the quantities of flowers that always 
filled all the rooms, beginning to read, and then throwing 
aside novels and books of poetry, of which she always had 
a large number; and, I believe, lying for hours, doing 
nothing, on a couch in that yellow drawing-room, which, 
with her sole exception, no member of the Oke family had 
ever been known to stay in alone. Little by little I began 
to suspect and to verify another eccentricity of this eccen- 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


23 


trie being, and to understand why there were stringent 
orders never to disturb her in that yellow room. 

It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or two other 
old English manor-houses, to keep a certain amount of the 
clothes of each generation, more particularly wedding 
dresses. A certain carved oaken press, of which Mr. Oke 
once displayed the contents to me, was a perfect museum 
of costumes, male and female, from the early years of the 
seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century — a thing 
to take away the breath of a bric-a-brac collector, an an- 
tiquary or a genre painter. Mr. Oke was none of these, 
and therefore took but little interest in the collection, save 
in so far as it interested his family feeling. Still, he seemed 
well acquainted with the contents of that press. 

He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, when 
suddenly I noticed that he frowned. I know not what im- 
pelled me to say, “By the way, have you any dresses of 
that Mrs. Oke whom your wife resembles so much? Have 
you got that particular white dress she was painted in, 
perhaps?” 

Oke of Okehurst flushed very red. 

“We have it,” he answered, hesitatingly, “ but — it isn’t 
here at present — I can’t find it. I suppose,” he blurted 
out, with an effort, “that Alice has got it. Mrs. Oke 
sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old things 
down. I suppose she takes ideas from them. ” 

A sudden-light dawned in my mind. The white dress in 
which I had seen Mrs. Oke in the yellow room, the day 
that she showed me Lovelock’s verses, was not, as I had 
thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress of Alice 
Oke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret — the dress in which, 
perhaps, Christopher Lovelock had seen her in that very 
room. 

The idea gave me a delightful, picturesque shudder. I 
said nothing. But I pictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in 
that yellow room -that room which no Oke of Okehurst 
save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the dress of her 
ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting 
something that seemed to fill the place— that vague pres- 
ence, it seemed to me, of the murdered cavalier poet. 

Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a re- 
sult of being extremely indifferent. She really did not care 
in the least about anything except her own ideas and day- 
dreams, except when, every now and then, she was seized 
with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or supersti- 
tions of her husband. Very soon she got into the way of 
never talking to me at all, save about Alice and Nicholas 
Oke, and Christopher Lovelock; and then, when the fit 
seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking her- 


24 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


self whether I were or were not equally interested in the 
strange craze that fascinated her. It so happened that I 
was. I loved to listen to her, going on discussing by the 
hour the merits of Lovelock’s poems, and analyzing her 
feelings and those of her two ancestors. 

It was quite wonderful to watch the exquisite, exotic 
creature in one of these moods, with the distant look in her 
gray eyes, and the absent -looking smile in her thin cheeks, 
talking as if she had intimately known these people of the 
seventeenth century, discussing every minute mood of 
theirs, detailing every scene between them and their vic- 
tim, talking of Alice and Nicholas and Lovelock as she 
might of her most intimate friends. Of Alice, particularly, 
and of Lovelock. She seemed to know every word that 
Alice had spoken, every idea that had crossed her mind. 
It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me, speaking 
of herself in the third person, of her own feelings — as if I 
were listening to a woman’s confidences, the recital of her 
doubts, scruples, and agonies about a lining lover. For 
Mrs. Oke, who seemed the most self-absorbed of creatures 
in all other matters, and utterly incapable of understand- 
ing or sympathizing with the feelings of other persons, 
entered completely and passionately into the feelings of 
this woman, this Alice, who, at some moments, seemed to 
be not another woman, but herself. 

‘ ‘ But how could she do it — how could she kill the man 
she cared for?” I once asked her. 

“ Because she loved him more than the whole world!” 
she exclaimed, and rising suddenly from her chair, walked 
toward the window, covering her face with her hands. 

I could see, from the movement of her neck, that she 
was sobbing. She did not turn round, but motioned me to 
go away. 

“ Don’t let us talk any more about it,” she said. “I am 
ill to-day, and silly.” 

I closed the door gently behind me. What mystery was 
there in this woman’s life? This listlessness, this strange 
self -engrossment and stranger mania about people long 
dead, this indifference and desire to annoy toward her hus- 
band— did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still 
loved some one who was not the master of Okehurst? 
And his melancholy, his preoccupation, the something 
about him that told of a broken youth — did it mean that he 
knew it? 


CHAPTER V. 

The following days Mrs. Oke was in a condition of quite 
unusual good spirits. Some visitors — distant relatives 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


25 


were expected, and although she had expressed the utmost 
annoyance at the idea of their coming, she was now seized 
with a fit of house- keeping activity, and was perpetually 
about arranging things and giving orders, although all 
arrangements, as usual, had been made, and all orders 
given, by her husband. 

William Oke was quite radiant. 

“If only Alice were always well like this,” he exclaimed; 
‘ 1 if only she would take, or could take, an interest in life, 
how different things would be. But,” he added, as if 
fearful lest he should be supposed to accuse her in any way, 
“how can she, usually, with her wretched health? Still, it 
does make me awfully happy to see her like this.” 

I nodded. But I cannot say that I really acquiesced in 
his views. It seemed to me, particularly with the recollec- 
tion of yesterday’s extraordinary scene, that Mrs. Oke’s 
high spirits were anything but normal. There was some- 
thing in her unusual activity and still more unusual cheer- 
fulness that was merely nervous and feverish; and I had, 
the whole day, the impression of dealing with a woman 
Avho was ill and who would very speedily collapse. 

Mrs. Oke spent her day wandering from one room to an- 
other, and from the garden to the greenhouse, seeing 
whether all were in order, when, as a matter of fact, all 
was always in order at Okehurst. She did not give me 
any sitting, and not a word was spoken about Alice Oke or 
Christopher Lovelock. Indeed, to a casual observer, it 
might have seemed as if all that craze about Lovelock had 
completely departed, or never existed. About five o’clock, 
as I was strolling among the red-brick, round-gabled out- 
houses — each with its armorial oak — and the old-fashioned 
espaliered kitchen and fruit garden, I saw Mrs. Oke stand- 
ing, her hands full of York and Lancaster roses, upon the 
steps facing the stables. A groom was curry combing a 
horse, and outside the coach-house was Mr. Oke’s little 
high-wheeled cart. 

4 ‘ Let us have a drive !’ ’ suddenly exclaimed Mrs. Oke, 
on seeing me. “ Look, what a beautiful evening— and look 
at that dear little cart! It is so long since I have driven, 
and I feel as if I must drive again. Come with me. And 
you, harness Jim at once and come round to the door.” 

I was quite amazed ; and still more so when the cart 
drove up before the door, and Mrs. Oke called me to ac- 
company her. She sent away the groom, and in a min- 
ute we were rolling along, at a tremendous pace, along 
the yellow sand road, with the sear pasture- lands, the big 
oaks, on either side. 

I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, in her 
mannish little coat and hat, driving a powerful young 


2 fi 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


horse with the utmost skill, and chattering like a school- 
girl of sixteen, could not be the delicate, morbid, exotic 
hothouse creature, unable to walk or to do anything, who 
spent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmos- 
phere, redolent with strange scents and associations, of 
the yellow drawing-room. The movement of the light 
carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of the w T heels 
upon the gravel, seemed to go to her head like wine. 

“ It is so long since I have done this sort of thing, ” she 
kept repeating; “so long, so long. Oh, don’t you think it 
delightful, going at this pace, with the idea that at any 
moment the horse may come down and we two be killed?” 
and she laughed her childish laugh, and turned her face, 
no longer pale, but flushed with the movement and the ex- 
citement, toward me. 

The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one gate after 
another swinging to behind us, as we flew up and down the 
little hills, across the pasture-lands, through the little red- 
brick gabled villages, where the people came out to see us 
pass, past the rows of willows along the streams, and the 
dark-green, compact hop-fields, with the blue and hazy 
tree-tops of the horizon getting bluer and more hazy as the 
yellow light began to graze the ground. At last we got to 
an open space, a high -lying piece of common -land, such as 
is rare in that ruthlessly utilized country of grazing- 
grounds and hop-gardens. Among the low hills of the 
Weald, it seemed quite preternaturally high up, giving a 
sense that its extent of flat heather and gorse, bound by 
distant firs, was really on the top of the world. The sun 
was setting just opposite, and its lights lay flat on the 
ground, staining it with the red and black of the heather, 
or rather turning it into the surface of a purple sea, can- 
opied over by a bank of dark- purple clouds — the jet -like 
sparkle of the dry ling and gorse tipping the purple like 
sunlit wavelets. A cold wind swept in our faces. 

“ What is the name of this place?” I asked. It was the 
only bit of impressive scenery that I had met in the neigh- 
borhood of Okehurst. 

“It is called Cotes Common,” answered Mrs. Oke, who 
had slackened the pace of the horse and let the reins hang 
loose about his neck. ‘ ‘ It was here that Christopher Love- 
lock was killed. 1 ’ 

There was a moment’s pause; and then she proceeded, 
tickling the flies from the horse’s ears with the end of her 
whip, and looking straight into the sunset, which now 
rolled, a deep-purple stream, across the heath to our feet. 

“Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from 
Appledore, when, as he had got half-way across Cotes 
Common, somewhere about here— for I have always heard 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


27 


them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about the 
place— he saw two men riding toward him, in whom he 
presently recognized Nicholas Oke of Okehurst accom- 
panied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailed him, and Love- 
lock rode up to meet him. 1 1 am glad to have met you, 
Mr. Lovelock, ’ said Nicholas, ‘ because I have some impor- 
tant news for you ;’ and so saying, he brought his horse 
close to the one that Lovelock was riding, and, suddenly 
turning round, fired off a pistol at his head. Lovelock had 
time to move, and the bullet, instead of striking him, went 
straight into the head of his horse, which fell beneath him. 
Lovelock, however, had fallen in such way as to be able to 
extricate himself easily from his horse ; and, drawing his 
sword, he rushed upon Oke and seized his horse by the 
bridle. Oke quickly jumped off and drew his sword; and 
in a minute Lovelock, who was much the better swords- 
man of the two, was having the better of him. 

‘ ‘ Lovelock had completely disarmed him, and got his 
sword upon Oke’s neck, crying out to him that if he would 
ask forgiveness he would be spared for the sake of their 
old friendship, when the groom suddenly rode up from be- 
hind, and shot Lovelock through the back. Lovelock fell, 
and Oke immediately tried to finish him with his sword, 
while the groom drew up and held the bridle of Oke’s 
horse. At that moment the sunlight fell upon the groom’s 
face, and Lovelock recognized Mrs. Oke. He cried out, 
‘Alice, Alice, it is you who have murdered me!’ and died. 
Then Nicholas Oke sprung into his saddle and rode off with 
his wife, leaving Lovelock dead by the side of his fallen 
horse. Nicholas Oke had taken the precaution of remov- 
ing Lovelock’s purse and throwing it into the pond, so the 
murder was put down to certain highwaymen who were 
about in that part of the country. Alice Oke died many 
years afterward, quite an old woman, in the reign of 
Charles II. ; but Nicholas did not live very long, and shortly 
before his death got into a very strange condition, always 
brooding, and sometimes threatening to kill his wife. They 
say that in one of these fits, just shortly before his death, 
he told the whole story of the murder, and made a prophecy 
that when the head of his house and master of Okehurst 
should marry another Alice Oke, descended from himself 
and his wife, there should be an end of the Okes of Oke- 
hurst. You see, it seems to be coming true. We have no 
children, and I don’t suppose we shall ever have any. I, 
at least, have never wished for them. ’ ’ 

Mrs. Oke paused, and turned her face toward me with 
the absent smile in her thin cheeks ; her eyes no longer had 
that distant look— they were strangely eager and fixed. I 
did not know what to answer, this woman positively 


28 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


frightened me. We remained for a moment in that same 
place, with the sunlight dying away in crimson ripples on 
the heather, gilding the yellow banks, the black waters of 
the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, and the gravel-pits ; 
while the wind blew in our faces, and bent the ragged, 
warped, bluish tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched 
the horse, and we went off at a furious pace. We did not 
exchange a single word, I think, on the way home. Mrs. 
Oke sat with her eyes fixed on the reins, breaking the si- 
lence now and then only by a word to the horse, urging 
him to an even more furious pace. The people we met 
along the roads must have thought that the horse was run- 
ning away, unless they noticed Mrs. Oke’s calm manner 
and the look of excited enjoyment in her face. To me it 
seemed that I was in the hands of a madwoman, and I 
quietly prepared myself for being upset or dashed against 
a cart. It had turned cold, and the draught was icy in 
our faces when we got within sight of the red gables and 
high chimney-stacks of Okehurst. Mr. Oke was standing 
before the door. On our approach I saw a look of relieved 
suspense, of keen pleasure, come into his face. 

He lifted his wife out of the cart in his strong arms with 
a kind of chivalrous tenderness. 

“I am so glad to have you back, darling,” he exclaimed 
— “ so glad ! I was delighted to hear you had gone out 
with the cart, but as you have not driven for so long, I was 
beginning to be frightfully anxious, dearest. Where have 
you been all this time?” 

Mrs. Oke had quickly extricated herself from her hus- 
band, who had remained holding her, as one might hold a 
delicate child who has been causing anxiety. The gentle- 
ness and affection of the poor fellow* had evidently not 
touched her — she seemed almost to recoil from it. 

‘ ‘ I have taken him to Cotes Common, 1 ’ she said, with 
that perverse look which I had noticed before, as she 
pulled off her driving gloves. “It is such a splendid old 
place. ’ ’ 

Mr. Oke flushed as if he had bitten upon a bad tooth, 
and the double gash painted itself scarlet between his eye- 
brows. 

Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veiling the 
park land dotted with big, black oaks, and from v r hich, in 
the watery moonlight, rose on all sides the eerie little cry 
of the lambs separated from their mothers. It was damp 
and cold, and I shivered. 

CHAPTER VI. 

The next day Okehurst was full of people, and Mrs. 
Oke, to my amazement, was doing the honors of it as if a 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


29 


houseful of commonplace, noisy young creatures, bent 
upon flirting and tennis, were her usual idea of felicity. 

The afternoon of the third day— they had come for an 
electioneering ball, and stayed three nights— the weather 
changed ; it turned suddenly very cold and began to pour. 
Every one was sent indoors, and there was a general gloom 
suddenly over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got 
sick of her guests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, 
paying not the slightest attention to the chattering and 
piano-strumming in the room, when one of the guests sud- 
denly proposed that they should play charades. He was a 
distant cousin of the Okes, a sort of fashionable, artistic 
Bohemian, swelled out to intolerable conceit by the ama- 
teur-actor vogue of a season. 

“It would be lovely in this marvelous old place,” he 
cried, “just to dress up, and parade abopt, and feel as if 
we belonged to the past. I have heard you have a marvel - 
ous collection of old costumes, more or less, ever since the 
day of Noah, somewhere, Cousin Willie.” 

The whole party exclaimed in joy at this proposal. Will- 
iam Oke looked puzzled for a moment, and glanced at his 
wife, who continued to lie listless on her sofa. 

“ There is a pressful of clothes belonging to the family, ” 
he answered, dubiously ; apparently overwhelmed by the 
desire to please his guests; “but — but — I don’t know 
whether it’s quite respectful to dress up in the clothes of 
dead people.” 

“ Oh, fiddlestick !” cried the cousin. “ What do the dead 
people know about it? Besides,” he added, with mock 
seriousness, ‘ ‘ I assure you we shall behave in the most 
reverent way and feel quite solemn about it all, if only you 
will give us the key, old man.” 

Again Mr. Oke looked toward his wife, and again met 
only her vague, absent glance. 

“Very well,” he said, and led his guests up-stairs. 

An hour later the house was filled with the strangest 
crew and the strangest noises. I had entered, to a certain 
extent, into William Oke’s feeling of unwillingness to let 
his ancestors’ clothes and personality be taken in vain ; but 
when the masquerade was complete, I must say that the 
effect was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men and 
women — those who were staying in the house and some 
neighbors who had come for lawn-tennis and dinner — were 
rigged out under the direction of the theatrical cousin, in 
the contents of that oaken press ; and I have never seen a 
more beautiful sight than the paneled corridors, the carved 
and escutcheoned staircase, the dim drawing-rooms with 
their faded tapestries, the great hall with its vaulted and 


30 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


ribbed ceiling, dotted about with groups and single figures 
that seemed to have come straight from the past. 

Even William Oke, who, besides myself and a few 
elderly people, was the only man not masqueraded, seemed 
delighted and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy 
character suddenly came out in him; and, finding that 
there was no costume left for him, he rushed up- stairs and 
presently returned in the uniform he had worn before his 
marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent 
a specimen of the handsome Englishman; he looked, de 
spite all the modern associations of his costume, more gen- 
uinely old-world than all the rest, a knight for the Black 
Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features and 
beautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute even 
the elderly people had got costumes of some sort — dominoes 
arranged at the moment, and hoods and all manner of dis- 
guises made out of pieces of old embroidery and Oriental 
stuffs and furs ; and very soon this rabble of maskers had 
become, so to speak, completely drunk with its own amuse- 
ment, with the childishness, and, if I may say so, the bar 
barism, the vulgarity underlying the majority even of 
well-bred English men and women— Mr. Oke himself doing 
the mountebank like a schoolboy at Christmas. 

“ Where is Mrs. Oke? Where is Alice?” some one sud- 
denly asked. 

Mrs. Oke had vanished. I could fully understand that 
to this eccentric being, with her fantastic, imaginative, 
morbid passion for the past, such a carnival as this must 
be positively revolting; and, absolutely indifferent as she 
was to giving offense, I could imagine how she would have 
retired, disgusted and outraged, to dream her strange day- 
dreams in the yellow room. 

But a moment later, as we were all noisily preparing tc 
go in to dinner, the door opened and a strange figure en- 
tered, stranger than any of these others who were profan- 
ing the clothes of the dead: a boy, slight and tall, in a 
brown riding-coat, leathern belt, and big buff boots, a lib 
tie gray cloak over one shoulder, a large gray hat slouched 
over the eyes, a dagger and pistol at the waist. It was 
Mrs. Oke, her eyes preternaturally bright, and her whole 
face lit up with a bold, perverse smile. 

Every one exclaimed, and stood aside. Then there was 
a moment’s silence, broken by faint applause. Even to a 
crew of noisy boys and girls playing the fool in the gar 
ments of men and women long dead and buried, there is 
something questionable in the sudden appearance of a 
young married woman, the mistress of the house, in a rid- 
ing-coat and jack-boots; and Mrs. Oke’s expression did not 
inake the jest seem any the less questionable. 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


31 


“What is that costume?” asked the theatrical cousin, 
who, after a second, had come to the conclusion that Mrs. 
Oke was merely a woman of marvelous talent whom he 
must try and secure for his amateur troop next season. 

“ It is the dress in which an ancestress of ours, my name- 
sake, Alice Oke, used to go out riding with her husband in 
the days of Charles I.,” she answered, and took her seat at 
the head of the table. Involuntarily my eyes sought those 
of Oke of Okehurst. He, who blushed as easily as a girl 
of sixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I noticed that 
he pressed his hand almost convulsively* to his mouth. 

“Don’t you recognize my dress, William?” asked Mrs. 
Oke, fixing her eyes upon him with a cruel smile. 

He did not answer, and there was a moment’s silence, 
which the theatrical cousin had the happy thought of 
breaking by jumping upon his seat and emptying off his 
glass with the exclamation : 

‘ ‘ To the health of the two Alice Okes, of the past and the 
present!” 

Mrs. Oke nodded, and, with an expression I had never 
seen in her face before, answered in a loud and aggressive 
tone: 

‘ ‘ To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher Lovelock, if 
his ghost be honoring this house with its presence!” 

I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the 
table, in the midst of this roomful of noisy wretches, 
tricked out, in red, blue, purple, and parti-color, as men 
and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth 
centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes 
and clowns, with faces painted and corked and floured 
over, I seemed to see that sanguine sunset, washing like a 
sea of blood over the heather, to where, by the black pond 
and the wind- warped firs, was lying the body of Christo- 
pher Lovelock, with his wounded horse near him, the yel- 
low gravel and lilac ling soaked crimson all round; the 
above emerged, as out of the redness, the pale blonde head 
covered with the gray hat, the absent eyes, and strange 
smile of Mrs. Oke. It seemed to me horrible, vulgar, 
abominable, as if I had got inside a madhouse. 


CHAPTER VII. 

From that moment I noticed a change in William Oke; 
or, rather, a change that had probably been coming on for 
some time got to the stage of being noticeable. 

I don’t know whether he had any words with his wife 
about her masquerade of that unlucky evening. On the 
whole, I decidedly think not. Oke was Avith every one a 
diffident and reserved man, and most of all so with 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


‘&a 

his wife ; besides, I can fancy that he would experience a 
positive impossibility of putting into words any strong 
feeling of disapprobation toward her, that his disgust would 
necessarily be silent. But be this as it may, I perceived 
very soon that the relations between my host and hostess 
had become exceedingly strained. Mrs. Oke, indeed, had 
never paid much attention to her husband, and seemed 
merely a trifle more indifferent to his presence than she 
had been before. But Oke himself, although he affected 
to address her at meals, from a desire to conceal his feeling 
and a fear of making the position disagreeable to me, very 
clearly could scarcely bear to speak to or even see his wife. 
The poor fellow’s honest soul was quite brimful of pain, 
which he was determined not to permit to overflow, and 
which seemed to filter into his whole nature and poison it. 

This woman had shocked and pained him more than 
was possible to say, and yet it was evident that he could 
neither cease loving her, nor commence comprehending 
her real nature. I sometimes felt, as we took our long 
walks through the monotonous country, across the oak- 
dotted grazing grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green, 
serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value 
of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village schools, 
the Primrose League, and the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, 
while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down every tall thistle 
that caught his eye — I sometimes felt, I say, an intense 
and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife’s 
character. I seemed to understand it so well, and to un- 
derstand it well seemed to imply such a comfortable ac- 
quiescence; and it seemed so unfair that just he should 
be condemned to puzzle forever over this enigma, and 
wear out his soul trying to comprehend what now seemed 
so plain to me. But how would it ever be possible to make 
this serious, conscientious, slow-brained representative of 
English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness under- 
stand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, 
of poetic vision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked 
this earth under the name of Alice Oke? 

So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to understand ; 
but he was condemned also to suffer from his inability to 
do so. The poor fellow was constantly straining after an 
explanation of his wife’s peculiarities; and, although the 
effort was probably unconscious, it caused him a great deal 
of pain. The gash— the maniac-frown, as my friends call 
it— between his eyebrows seemed to have grown a perma- 
nent feature of his face. 

Mrs. Oke, on her side, was making the very worst of the 
situation. Perhaps she resented her husband’s tacit re- 
proval of that masquerade-night’s freak, and determined 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


33 


to make him swallow more of the same stuff, for she clearly 
thought that one of William’s peculiarities, and one for 
which she despised him, was that he could never be goaded 
into an outspoken expression of disapprobation ; that from 
her he would swallow any amount of bitterness without 
complaining. At any rate, she now adopted a perfect 
policy of teasing and shocking her husband about the 
murder of Lovelock. She was perpetually alluding to it in 
her conversation, discussing in his presence what had or 
had not been the feelings of the various actors in the trag- 
edy of 1626, and insisting upon her resemblance to, and 
almost identity with, the original Alice Oke. 

Something had suggested to her eccentric mind that it 
would be delightful to perform in the garden at Okehurst, 
under the huge ilexes and elms, a little masque which she had 
discovered among Christopher Lovelock’s works ; and she 
began to scour the country and enter into vast correspond- 
ence for the purpose of effectuating the scheme. Letters 
arrived every other day from the theatrical cousin, whose 
only objection was that Okehurst was too remote a locality 
for an entertainment in which he foresaw great glory to 
himself. And every now and then there would arrive 
some young gentleman or lady, whom Alice Oke had sent 
for to see whether they would do. 

I saw very plainly that the performance would never 
take place, and that Mrs. Oke herself had no intention 
that it ever should. She was one of those creatures to 
whom realization of a project is nothing, and who enjoy 
plan-making almost the more for knowing that all wiil 
stop short at the plan. Meanwhile, this perpetual talk 
about the pastoral, about Lovelock, this continual attitud- 
inizing as the wife of Nicholas Oke, had the further at- 
traction to Mrs. Oke of putting her husband into a con- 
dition of frightful though suppressed irritation, which she 
en joyed with the enjoyment of a perverse child. You must 
not think that I looked on indifferent, although I admit 
that this was a perfect treat to an amateur student of char- 
acter like myself. I really did feel most sorry for poor 
Oke, and frequently quite indignant with his wife. I was 
several times on the point of beggings her to have more 
consideration for him, even of suggesting that this kind of 
behavior* particularly before a comparative stranger like 
me, was very poor taste. But there was something illus- 
ive about Mrs. Oke which made it next to impossible to 
speak seriously with her: and, besides, I was by no means 
sure that any interference on my part would not merely 
animate her perversity. 

One evening a curious incident took place. We had just 
sat down to dinner, the Okes, the theatrical cousin, who 


34 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


was down for a couple of days, and three or four neigh- 
bors. It was dusk, and the yellow light of the candles 
mingled charmingly with the grayness of the evening. 
Mrs. Oke was not well, and had been remarkably quiet all 
day, more diaphanous, strange, and far away than ever ; 
and her husband seemed to have felt a sudden return of 
tenderness, almost of compassion, for this delicate, fragile 
creature. We had been talking of quite indifferent mat- 
ters, when I saw Mr. Oke suddenly turn very white, and 
look fixedly for a moment at the window opposite to his 
seat. 

“ Who’s that fellow looking in at the window, and mak- 
ing signs to you, Alice? D — n his impudence!” he cried, 
and, jumping up, ran to the window, opened it, and passed 
out into the twilight. 

We all looked at each other in surprise ; some of the party 
remarked upon the carelessness of servants in letting 
nasty -looking fellows hang about the kitchen, others told 
stories of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke did not speak; 
but I noticed the curious, distant-looking smile in her thin 
cheeks. 

After a minute, William Oke came in, his napkin in his 
hand. He shut the window behind him, and silently re- 
sumed his place. 

“ Well, who was it?” we all asked. 

“Nobody. I — I must have made a mistake,” he an- 

swered, and turned crimson, while he busily pealed a pear. 

“It was probably Lovelock,” remarked Mrs. Oke, just 
as she might have said, “ It was probably the gardener,” 
but with that faint smile of pleasure still in her face. Ex- 
cept the theatrical cousin, who burst into a loud laugh, 
none of the company had ever heard Lovelock’s name, and, 
doubtless imagining him to be some natural appanage of 
the Oke family, groom or farmer, said nothing ; so the sub- 
ject dropped. 

From that evening onward things began to assume a 
different aspect. That incident was the beginning of a per- 
fect system— a system of what? I scarcely know how to 
call it. A system of grim jokes on the part of Mrs. Oke, 
of superstitious fancies on the part of her husband— a 
system of mysterious persecutions on the part of some less 
earthly tenant of Okehurst. Well, yes, after all, why not? 
We have all heard of ghosts; had uncles, cousins, grand- 
mothers, nurses, who have seen them; we are all a bit 
afraid of them at the bottom of our soul; so why shouldn’t 
they be? I am too sceptical to believe in the impossibility 
of anything, for my part. 

Besides, when a man has lived throughout a summer in 
the same house with a woman like Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


35 


he gets to believe in the possibility of a great many im- 
probable things, I assure you, as a mere result of believing 
in her. And when you come to think of it, why not? That 
a weird creature, visibly not of this earth, a reincarnation 
of a woman who murdered her lover two centuries and a 
half ago, that such a creature should have the power of at- 
tracting about her (being altogether superior to earthly 
lovers) the man who loved her in that previous existence, 
whose love for her was his death— what is there astonish- 
ing in that? Mrs. Oke herself, I feel quite persuaded, be 
lieved or half believed it ; indeed, she very seriously ad- 
mitted the possibility thereof, one day when I made the 
suggestion half in jest. At all events, it rather pleased me 
to think so; it fitted in so well with the woman’s whole 
personality ; it explained those hours and hours spent all 
alone in the yellow room, where the very air, with its scent 
of heady flowers and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent 
of ghosts. It explained that strange smile which was not 
for any of us, and yet was not merely for herself, that 
strange, far-off look in the wide, pale eyes. I liked the 
idea, and I liked to tease, or rather to delight her with it. 
How should I know that the wretched husband would take 
such matters seriously? 

He became day by day more silent and perplexed-look- 
ing: and, as a result, worked harder, and probably with 
less effect, at his land -improving schemes and political can- 
vassing. It seemed to me that he was perpetually listening, 
watching, waiting for something to happen: a word spoken 
suddenly, the sharp opening of a door, would make him 
start, turn crimson, and almost tremble ; the mention of 
Lovelock brought a helpless look, half a convulsion, like 
that of a man overcome by great heat, into his face. And 
his wife, so far from taking any interest in his altered looks, 
went on irritating him more and more. Every time that 
the poor fellow gave one of those starts of his, or turned 
crimson at the sudden sound of a footstep, Mrs. Oke 
would ask him, with her contemptuous indifference, 
whether he had seen Lovelock. I soon began to perceive 
that my host was getting perfectly ill. He would sit at 
meals never saying a word, with his eyes fixed scrutiniz- 
ingly on his wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dread- 
ful mystery ; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went on 
talking in her listless way about the mask, about Love- 
lock, always about Lovelock. During our walks and rides, 
which we continued pretty regularly, he would start when- 
ever in the roads or lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in its 
grounds, we perceived a figure in the distance. I have seen 
him tremble at what, on nearer approach, I could scarcely 
restrain my laughter on discovering to be some well-known 


36 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


farmer or neighbor or servant. Once, as we were return- 
ing home at dusk, he suddenly caught my arm and pointed 
across the oak-dotted pastures in the direction of the 
garden, then he started off almost at a run, with his dog 
behind him, as if in pursuit of some intruder. 

“ Who-was it?” I asked. And Mr. Oke merely shook his 
head mournfully! Sometimes in the early autumn twi- 
lights, when the white mists rose from the park land, and the 
rooks formed long black lines on the palings, I almost 
fancied I saw him start at the very trees and bushes, the 
outlines of the distant oasthouses, with their conical roofs 
and projecting vanes, like jibing fingers in the half -light. 

“ Your husband is ill, 1 ’ I once ventured to remark to Mrs. 
Oke, as she sat for the hundred and thirtieth of my pre- 
paratory sketches (I somehow could never get beyond pre- 
paratory sketches with her). She raised her beautiful, 
wide, pale eyes, making as she did so that exquisite curve 
of shoulders and neck, and delicate pale head that I so 
vainly longed to reproduce. 

“ I don’t see it,” she answered, quietly. “ If he is, why 
doesn’t he go up to town and see the doctor? It’s merely 
one of his glum fits.” 

‘‘You should not tease him about Lovelock,” I added, 
very seriously. “ He will get to believe in him.” 

“ Why not? If he sees him, why he sees him. He would 
not be the only person that has done so;” and she smiled 
faintly and half perversely, as her eyes sought that usual 
distant, indefinable something. 

But Oke got w*)rse. He was growing perfectly un- 
strung, like a hysterical woman. One evening that we 
were sitting alone in the smoking-room, he began unex- 
pectedly a rambling discourse about his wife; how he had 
first known her when they were children, and they had 
gone to the same dancing-school near Portland Place ; how 
her mother, his aunt-in-law, had brought her for Christ- 
mas to Okehurst, while he was on his holidays; how 
finally, thirteen years ago, when he was twenty -three and 
she was eighteen, they had been married ; how terribly he 
had suffered when they had been disappointed of their 
baby, and she had nearly died of the illness. 

“ I did not mind about the child, you know,” he said, in 
an excited voice; “although there will be an end of us 
now, and Okehurst will go to the Curtises. I minded only 
about Alice.” It was next to inconceivable that this poor, 
excited creature, speaking almost with tears in his voice 
and in his eyes, was the quiet, well-got-up, irreproachable 
young ex-guardsman who had walked into my studio a 
couple of months before. 

Oke was silent for a moment, looking fixedly at the rug 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 87 

at his feet, when he suddenly burst out, in a scarce audible 
voice 

‘ ; If you knew how I cared for Alice— how I still care for 
her ! I could kiss the ground she walks upon. I would 
give anything— ray life any day— if only she would look 
for two minutes as if she liked me a little— as if she didn’t 
utterly despise me;” and the poor fellow burst into a hys- 
terical laugh, which was almost a sob. Then he suddenly 
began to laugh outright, exclaiming, with a sort of vul- 
garity of intonation which was extremely foreign to him: 

“ D — n it, old fellow, this is a queer world we live in!” 
and rang for more brandy-and-soda, which he was begin- 
ning, I noticed, to take pretty freely now, although he had 
been almost a blue-ribbon man— as much so as is possible 
for a hospitable country gentleman— when I first arrived. 


CHAPTER VIII. 

It became clear to me now that, incredible as it might 
seem, the thing that ailed William Oke was jealousy. He 
was simply madly in love with his wife, and madly iealous 
of her. Jealous — but of whom? He himself would prob- 
ably have been quite unable to say. In the first place — to 
clear off any possible suspicion— certainly not of me . Be- 
sides the fact that Mrs. Oke took only just a very little 
more interest in me than in the butler or the upper house- 
maid, I think that Oke himself was the sort of man whose 
imagination would recoil from realizing any definite object 
of jealousy, even though jealousy might be killing him 
inch by inch. It remained a vague, permeating, continu- 
ous feeling — the feeling that he loved her, and that she did 
not care a jackstraw about him, and that everything with 
which she came into contact was receiving some of that 
notice which was refused to him — every person or thing, 
or tree or stone : it was the recognition of that strange, far- 
off look in Mrs. Oke’s eyes, of that strange, absent smile on 
Mrs. Oke’s lips — eyes and lips that had no look and no 
smile for him. 

Gradually his nervousness, his watchfulness, suspicious- 
ness, tendency to start, took a definite shape. Mr. Oke 
was forever alluding to steps or voices he had heard, to 
figures he had seen sneaking round the house: The sud- 
den bark of one of the dogs would make him jump up. He 
cleaned and loaded very carefully all the guns and re- 
volvers in his study, and even some of the old fowling- 
pieces and holster-pistols in the hall. The servants and 
tenants thought that Oke of Okehurst had been seized with 
a terror of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke smiled con- 
temptuously at all these doings. 


38 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


“My dear William,” she said one day, “the persons who 
worry you have just as good a right to walk up and down 
the passages and staircase, and to hang about the house as 
you or I. They were there, in all probability, long before 
either of us was born, and are greatly amused by your pre- 
posterous notions of privacy.” 

Mr. Oke laughed angrily. ‘ ‘ I suppose you will tell me 
it is Lovelock — your eternal Lovelock — whose steps I hear 
on the gravel every night. I suppose he has as good a 
right to be here as you or I.” And he strode out of the 
room. 

“ Lovelock-Lovelock ! Why will she always go on like 
that about Lovelock?” Mr. Oke asked me that evening, 
suddenly staring me in the face. 

I merely laughed. 

“It’s only because she has that play of his on the brain,” 
T answered; “and because she thinks you superstitious, 
and likes to tease you.” 

kk I don’t understand,” sighed Oke. 

How could he? And if I had tried to make him do so, 
he woud merely have thought I was insulting his wife, 
and have perhaps kicked me out of the room. So I made 
no attempt to explain psychological problems to him, and 

he asked me no more questions until once But I must 

first mention a curious incident that happened. 

The incident was simply this. Returning one afternoon 
from our usual walk, Mr. Oke suddenly asked the servant 
whether any one had come. The answer was in the nega- 
tive; but Oke did not seem satisfied. We had hardly sat 
down to dinner when he turned to his wife and asked, in 
a strange voice which I scarcely recognized as his own, 
who had called that afternoon. 

“No one,” answered Mrs. Oke; at least to the best of my 
knowledge.” 

William Oke looked at her fixedly. 

“ No one?” he repeated, in a scrutinizing tone; “no one, 
Alice?” 

Mrs. Oke shook her head. “ No one,” she replied. 

There was a pause. 

“ Who was it, then, that was walking with you near the 
pond, about five o’clock?” asked Oke, slowly. 

His wife lifted her eyes straight to his and answered, 
contemptuously : 

“No one was walking with me near the pond, at five 
o’clock or any other hour. ’ ’ 

Mr. Oke turned purple, and made a curious, hoarse noise, 
like a man choking. 

“ I— I thought I saw you walking with a man this after- 
noon, Alice,” he brought out with an effort; adding, for 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


39 


the sake of appearances before me, “I thought it might 
have been the curate, come with that report for me.” 

Mrs. Oke smiled. 

“ I can only repeat that no living creature has been near 
me this afternoon,” she said, slowly. “If you saw any 
one with me, it must have been Lovelock, for there cer- 
tainly was no one else. ’ ’ 

And she gave a little sigh, like a person trying to repro- 
duce in her mind some delightful but too evanescent im 
pression. 

I looked at my host ; from crimson his face had turned 
perfectly livid, and he breathed as if some one were 
squeezing his windpipe. 

No more was said about the matter. I vaguely felt that 
a great danger was threatening. To Oke or to Mrs. Oke? 
I could not tell which ; but I was aware of an imperious 
inner call, to avert some dreadful evil, to exert myself, to 
explain, to interpose. I determined to speak to Oke the 
following day, for I trusted him to give me a quiet hear- 
ing, and I did not trust Mrs. Oke. That woman would slip 
through my fingers like a snake if I attempted to grasp her 
elusive character. 

I asked Oke whether he would take a walk with me the 
next afternoon, and he consented to do so with a curious 
eagerness. We started about three o’clock. It was a 
stormy, chilly afternoon, with great balls of white clouds 
rolling rapidly in the cold, blue sky, and occasional lurid 
gleams of sunlight, broad and yellow, which made the 
black ridge of the storm, gathered on the horizon, look 
blue-black, like ink. 

We walked quickly across the sear and sodden grass of 
the park, and on to the highroad that led over the low 
hills, I don’t know why, in the direction of Cotes Common. 
Both of us were silent, for both of us had something to say, 
and did not know how to begin. For my part, I recog- 
nized the impossibility of starting the subject ; an uncalled- 
for interference from me would merely indispose Mr. Oke, 
and make him doubly dense of comprehension. So, if Oke 
had something to say, which he evidently had, it was bet- 
ter to wait for him. 

Oke, however, broke the silence only by pointing Out to 
me the condition of the hops, as we passed one of his many 
hop-gardens. “It will be a poor year,” he said, stopping 
short, and looking intently before him— “no hops at all. 
No hops this autumn.” 

I looked at him. It was clear that he had no notion 
what he was saying. The dark- green vines were covered 
with fruit; and only yesterday he himself had informed 


40 A PHANTOM LOVER . 

me that he had not seen such a profusion of hops for many 
years. 

I did not answer, and we walked on. A cart met us in 
a dip of the road, and the carter touched his hat and 
greeted Mr. Oke. But Oke took no heed ; he did not seem 
to be aware of the man’s presence. 

The clouds were collecting all round — black domes, 
among which coursed the round, gray masses of fleecy 
stuff. 

“ I think we shall be caught in a tremendous storm,” I 
said; “hadn’t we better be turning?” He nodded, and 
turned sharp round. 

The sunlight lay in yellow patches under the oaks of the 
pasture lands, and burnished the green hedges. The air 
was heavy, and yet cold, and everything seemed preparing 
for a great storm. The rooks whirled in black clouds 
round the trees and the conical red caps of the oasthouses 
which give that county the look of being studded with 
turreted castles; then they descended— a black line — upon 
the fields, with what seemed an unearthly loudness of caw. 
And all round there arose a shrill, quavering bleating of 
lambs and calling of sheep, while the wind began to catch 
the topmost branches of the trees. 

Suddenly Mr. Oke broke the silence : 

“ I don’t know you very well,” he began, hurriedly, and 
without turning his face toward me; “but I think you are 
honest, and you have seen a good deal of the world— much 
more than I. I want you to tell me— but truly, please — 

what do you think a man should do if ” and he stopped 

for some minutes. 

“Imagine,” he went on, quickly,, “that a man cares a 
great deal — a very great deal for his wife, and that he finds 
out that she —well, that— that she is deceiving him. No- 
don’ t misunderstand me— I mean — she is constantly sur- 
rounded by some one else and will not admit it — some one 
whom she hides away. Do you understand? Perhaps she 
does not know all the risk she is running, you know, but 
she will not draw back — she will not avow it to her hus- 
band ” 

“My dear Oke,” I interrupted, attempting to take the 
matter lightly, “ these are questions that can’t be solved 
in the abstract, or by people to whom the thing has not 
happened. And it certainly has not happened to you or 
me.” 

Oke took no notice of my interruption. “You see,” he 
went on, “ the man doesn’t expect his wife to care much 
about him. It’s not that; he isn’t merely jealous, you 
know. But he feels that she is on the brink of dishonoring 
herself — because I don’t think a woman can really dishonor 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


41 


her husband ; dishonor is in our own hands, and depends 
only on our own acts. He ought to save her, do you see? 
He must, must save her in one way or another. But if she 
will not listen to him, what can he do? Must he seek out 
the other one, and try and get him out of the way? You 
see it’s all the fault of the other — not hers, not hers. If 
only she would trust in her husband, she would be safe. 
But that other one won’t let her.” 

“Look here, Oke,” I said boldly, but feeling rather 
frightened; “I know quite well what you are talking 
about. And I see you don’t understand the matter in the 
very least. I do. I have watched you and watched Mrs. 
Oke these six weeks, and I see what is the matter. Will 
you listen to me?” 

And, taking his arm, I tried to explain to him my view 
of the situation— that his wife was merely eccentric, and 
a little theatrical and imaginative, and that she took a 
pleasure in teasing him. That he, on the other hand, was 
letting himself get into a morbid state ; that he was ill, and 
ought to see a good doctor. I even offered to take him to 
town with me. 

I poured out volumes of psychological explanations. I 
dissected Mrs. Oke’s character twenty times over, and 
tried to show him that there was absolutely nothing at the 
bottom of his suspicions beyond an imaginative pose and a 
garden-play on the brain. I adduced twenty instances, 
mostly invented for the nonce, of ladies of my acquaintance 
who had suffered from similar fads. I pointed out to him 
that his wife ought to have an outlet for her imaginative 
and theatrical over- energy. I advised him to take her to 
London and plunge her into some set where every one 
should be more or less in a similar condition. I laughed at 
the notion of there being any hidden individual about the 
house. I explained to Oke that he was suffering from de- 
lusions, and called upon so conscientious and religious a 
man to take every step to rid himself of them, adding in- 
numerable examples of people who had cured themselves 
of seeing visions and of brooding over morbid fancies. I 
struggled and wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, and I 
really hoped I had made some impression. At first, indeed, 
I felt that not one of my words went into the man’s brain — 
that, though silent, he was not listening. It seemed almost 
hopeless to present my views in such a light that he could 
grasp them. I felt as if I were expounding and arguing at 
a rock. But when I got on to the tack of his duty toward 
his wife and himself, and appealed to his moral and re- 
ligious notions, I felt that I was making an impression. 

“ I dare say you are right,” he said, taking my hand as 
we came in sight of the red gables of Okehurst, and speak- 


42 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


ing in a weak, tired, humble voice. “I don’t understand 
you quite, but I am sure what you say is true. I dare say 
it is all that I’m seedy. I feel sometimes as if I were mad, 
and just fit to be locked up. But don’t think I don’t strug- 
gle against it. I „do, I do continually, only sometimes it 
seems too strong for me. I pray God night and morning 
to give me the strength to overcome my suspicions, or to 
remove these dreadful thoughts from me. God knows, I 
know what a wretched creature I am, and how unfit to 
take care of that poor girl.” 

And ' Oke again pressed my hand. As we entered the 
garden, he turned to me once more. 

“ I am very, very grateful to you,” he said, and, indeed, 
I will do my best to try and be stronger. If only,” he 
added, with a sigh, “if only Alice would give me a mo- 
ment’s breathing time, and not go on, day after day, mock- 
ing me with her Lovelock.” 


CHAPTER IX . 

I hap begun Mrs. Oke’s portrait, and she was giving me 
a sitting. She was unusually quiet that morning ; but, it 
seemed to me, with the quietness of a woman who is ex- 
pecting something, and she gave me the impression of 
being extremely happy. She had been reading, at my sug- 
gestion “Vita Nuova,” which she did not know before, 
and the conversation came to turn upon that, and upon 
the question whether love so abstract and so enduring 
were a possibility. Such a discussion, which might have 
savored of flirtation in the case of almost any other young 
and beautiful woman, became in the case of Mrs. Oke 
something quite different; it seemed distant, intangible, 
not of this earth, like her smile and the look in her eyes. 

“Such love as that,” she said, looking into the far dis- 
tance of the oak-dotted park land, “is very rare, but it 
can exist. It becomes a person’s whole existence, his whole 
soul ; and it can survive the death, not merely of the be- 
loved, but of the lover. It is unextinguishable, and goes 
on in the spiritual world until it meets a reincarnation of 
the beloved ; and when this happens, it jets out and draws 
to it all that may remain of that lover’s soul, and takes 
shape and surrounds the beloved one once more.” 

Mrs. Oke was speaking slowly, almost to herself, and I 
had never, I think, seen her look so strange and so beauti- 
ful, the stiff white dress bringing out but the more the 
exotic exquisiteness and incorporealness of her person. 

I did not know what to answer, so I said, half in jest : 

“ I fear you have been reading too much Buddhist litera- 


A PHANTOM LOVER . 


43 


ture, Mrs. Oke. There is something dreadfully esoteric ir? 
all you say.” 

She smiled contemptuously. 

“I know people can’t understand such matters,” she re- 
plied, and was silent for some time. But, through her 
quietness and silence, I felt, as it were, the throb of a 
strange excitement in this woman, almost as if I had been 
holding her pulse. 

Still, I was in hopes that things might be beginning to 
go better, in consequence of my interference. Mrs. Oke 
had scarcely once alluded to Lovelock in the last two or 
three days; and Oke had been much more cheerful and 
natural since our conversation. He no longer seemed so 
worried ; and once or twice I had caught in him a look of 
great gentleness and loving kindness, almost of pitj r , as to- 
ward some young and very frail thing, as he sat opposite 
his wife. 

But the end had come. After that sitting Mrs. Oke had 
complained of fatigue, and retired to her room ; and Oke 
had driven off on some business to the nearest town. I felt 
nil alone in the big house, and after having worked a little 
at a sketch I was making in the park, I amused myself 
rambling about the house. 

It was a warm, enervating, autumn afternoon ; the kind 
of weather that brings the perfume out of everything, the 
damp ground and fallen leaves, the flowers in the jars, the 
old woodwork and stuffs ; that seems to bring on to the 
surface of one’s consciousness all manner of vague recol- 
lections and expectations, a something half pleasurable, 
half painful, that makes it impossible to do or to think. I 
was the prey of this particular, not at all un pleasurable, 
restlessness. I wandered up and down the corridors, stop- 
ping to look at the pictures, which I knew already in every 
detail, to follow the pattern of the carving and old stuffs, 
to stare at the autumn flowers, arranged in magnificent 
masses of color in the big china bowls and jars. I took up 
one book after another and threw it aside ; then I sat down 
to the piano and began to play irrelevant fragments. I 
felt quite alone, although I had heard the grind of the 
wheels on the gravel which meant that my host had re- 
turned. I was lazily turning over a book of verses— I re- 
member it perfectly well, it was Morris’ “ Love is Enough ” 
— in a corner of the drawing-room, when the door sud- 
denly opened and William Oke showed himself. He did 
not enter, but beckoned to me to come out to him. There 
was something in his face that made me start up and fol- 
low him at once. He was extremely quiet, even stiff, not 
a muscle of his face moving, but very pale. 

“I have something to show you,” he said, leading me 


44 


A PHANTOM LOVER. 


through the vaulted hall, hung round with ancestral pict- 
ures, into the graveled space that looked like a filled-up 
moat, where stood the big, blasted oak, with its twisted, 
pointing branches. I followed him on to the lawn, or rather 
the piece of park land that ran up to the house. We 
walked quickly, he in front, without exchanging a word. 
Suddenly he stopped, just where there jutted out the bay- 
window of the yellow drawing-room, and I felt Oks’s hand 
tight upon my arm. 

1 ‘ I have brought you here to see something, ’ ’ he whis- 
pered, hoarsely ; and he led me to the window. 

I looked in. The room compared with out-doors, was 
rather dark ; but against the yellow wall I saw Mrs. Oke 
sitting alone on a couch in her white dress, her head slightly 
thrown back, a large red rose in her hand. 

“Do you believe now?” whispered Oke’s voice hot at my 
ear. “ Do you believe now? Was it all my fancy? But I 
will have him this time. I have locked the door inside, 
and by Heaven! he sha’n’t escape!” 

The words were not out of Oke’s mouth. I felt myself 
struggling with him silently outside that window. But he 
broke loose, pulled open the window, and leaped into the 
room, and I after him. As I crossed the threshold, some- 
thing flashed in my eyes ; there was a loud report, a sharp 
cry, and the thud of a body on the ground. 

Oke was standing in the middle of the room, with a faint 
smoke about him; and at his feet, sunk down from the 
sofa, with her blonde head resting on its seat, lay Mrs. Oke, 
a pool of red forming in her white dress. Her mouth was 
convulsed, as if in that automatic shriek, but her wide- 
open, white eyes seemed to smile vaguely and distantly. 

I know nothing of time. It all seemed to be one second, 
but a second that lasted hours. Oke stared, then turned 
round and laughed. 

‘ ‘ The d d rascal has given me the slip again !’ ’ he cried ; 

and quickly unlocking the door, rushed out of the house 
with dreadful cries. 

That is the end of the story. Oke tried to shoot himself 
that evening, but merely fractured his jaw, and died a few 
days later, raving. There were all sorts of legal inquiries, 
through which I went as through a dream ; and whence it 
resulted that Mr. Oke had killed his wife in a fit of mo- 
mentary madness. That was the end of Alice Oke. By 
the way, her maid brought me a locket which was found 
round her neck, all stained with blood. It contained some 
very dark auburn hair, not at all the color of William 
Oke’s. I am quite sure it was Lovelock’s. 


[tiie end.] 


OTTILIE 


By VERNON LEE. 


INTRODUCTORY. 

About forty years ago every one who stayed any time 

in the little Franconian town of W must have noticed 

an old couple who seemed to form part and parcel of the 
place. Every summer morning they would issue out of 
their wide-roofed, one -storied house on the outskirts of the 
town, walk slowly through one of the avenues of lime- 
trees, the old lady leaning lightly on the old gentleman’s 
arm, and go and sit on a certain bench by the riverside, 
where the current is sluggish and the bank overgrown with 
sedge and osiers. The lady was tall, thin, but very erect ; 
always neatly dressed in black, with a black silk shawl, 
and a, large, round cap of delicate muslin, from beneath 
which appeared only a few short white curls ; she carried a 
green reticule and a long- caned parasol. The gentleman 
was bent, and more worn-looking than his companion ; he 
walked slower, and she would stop every now and then to 
let him repose. He wore an old-fashioned dress of the time 
of Napoleon, with a high stock, a waistcoat with an im- 
mense collar, and a long- tailed coat, and shoes and stock- 
ings, or, when it was muddy, gaiters. The townsfolk would 
make room for them on their walks; some few, standing 
at their shop doors, would salute them, but very few ever 
addressed them. One or two old people, an old lawyer, and 
an old clerk, would occasionally be seen entering their 
house. They often spoke with the peasants who were 
working in the fields, and would sometimes stop some of 
the schoolchildren and talk with them as they sat on the 
bench by the riverside. No one seemed well acquainted 
with them, but every one respected them. 

The old couple, who were not man and wife, but brother 

and sister, had lived at W from time immemorial, and 

no one had ever seen them save together. The old man 
was called “the Poet” by the townsfolk. He had en- 


48 


0TTIL1E. 


joyed some literary reputation at the end of the last 
century and the beginning of this one. His works, with 
the exception of a little volume of verse and some collec- 
tions of popular legends which he had taken down from 
the mouth of the peasantry, were mostly tales of the fan- 
tastic, humorous, and pathetic style, slightly monotonous, 
and to our mind childish, which had been so popular in 
the time of Jean Paul and Hoffmann, and which are now 

well-nigh forgotten. People at W maintained that in 

all these productions the sister had done at least half the 
work, and indeed the general opinion seems to have been 
that she was the master-mind of the two. And truly, al- 
though she must have been several years older than her 
brother, she seemed, with her bright serenity, to give life 
and sustain to the weakly, melancholy, and wistful-looking 
old man. She was always the more cordial and talkative 
of the two, beckoning to the peasants and schoolchildren 
to come and talk with them. 

So the old couple went day after day, month after month, 
year after year, to sit on their accustomed bench beneath 
the lime-trees by the riverside. But one spring they failed 
to appear as usual with the first sunshine and flowers, and 
at length there came only the old gentleman, in black, all 
by himself, leaning on his cane. He came and sat on the 
accustomed seat, and remained by the riverside, looking 
vaguely at the stream flowing slowly among the tangled 
reeds and willows and water-lilies. Besides this accus- 
tomed walk, he would daily go to the little cemetery on the 
ramparts, where old-fashioned people are buried among 
foxgloves and rose-bushes; and after some time a maid- 
servant came with him and returned for him, supporting 
him on her arm, as he walked slowly and hesitatingly, 
with his thin yellow face bowed on to his stiff collar and 
cravat. At last, one day, he too was missing at the bench 
by the riverside, and another grave had been made by 
the side of that of his sister in the churchyard on the ram- 
parts. 

The house and all it contained were sold for the benefit 
of the charity schools, to whom the property had been be- 
queathed by the brother and sister; and the lawyer kept 
only some few books, some unfinished stories and poems, 
and a MS., which seems to have been part of the old man’s 
biography, and of which the following is a translation. It 
was in a mottled paper box, tied with yellowish white rib- 
bon, and on it was written: “ My Confession— 1809.” 


0TT1LIE, 


47 


CHAPTER I. 

My earliest personal recollections are of my sister ; all 
previous ones are indistinct and indirect — remembrances 
of remembrances — which seem to have no connection with 
my present ideality. 

I was born at Halberstadt on the 22d of March, 1759, and 
was christened Christoph Reinhart, after my paternal 
grandfather, Baron von Craussen, of Glogau. My father 
had been an officer in the electoral service, but having 
fallen into ill-health, was living at that time on a small 
pension, and on the remains of the fortune of my mother, 
who died at my birth. It was a great piece of good -luck, 
in our circumstances, that my half-sister should be educated 
at the expense of the court, in a school for the daughters of 
poor officers, which had just been founded by one of the 
electoral princesses. 

This princess was an elderly spinster, who devoted all 
her energies to meddling in other people’s concerns, and as 
the school was placed under her immediate supervision, she 
had frequent opportunities of remarking my sister. Thus 
it came about that Ottilie entered into her highness’ serv- 
ice as reader before she had attained the age prescribed for 
quitting the school. The old princess took a violent fancy 
for my sister, as people perfectly idle and excessively self- 
important always do take violent fancies. She made a 
sort of museum of clever people, and the passion of her life 
was to enlarge her collection. 

My sister was pretty and quite young, very active and 
patient, always ready to help her highness in her ever- 
changing schemes, and always bearing with perfect seren- 
ity the ups and downs in the old princess’ temper. Her 
highness used to speak of her as “the golden Ottilie,” and 
she determined to do something great for her at some in- 
definite period ; meanwhile, nothing in the world would have 
induced her to part with so invaluable a creature. Conse- 
quently, when, on the death of my father, Ottilie begged 
to resign her situation on my account, her highness be- 
came perfectly frantic. She threatened and entreated, 
accused my sister of the blackest ingratitude, and heaped 
golden promises before her. All to no purpose. As Ottilie 
could not part on good terms with her highness, there was 
nothing for it but to resign herself to leave her on bad ones. 
She packed her trunks, dismissed her maid, and early one 
morning slipped out of the palace, and of the capital. She 
afterward wrote to the princess begging her to forgive 
her seeming ingratitude, and explaining that it had be- 
come her duty to take care of her little orphan brother. 


48 


OTTILIE. 


She wrote a second time, but her highness would neither 
forgive nor answer, and no more was heard of “ the golden 
Ottilie.” 

On escaping from the palace, Ottilie got into the coach 
for Aspern. where my father had died. There she found 
me, a miserable, half-savage urchin, entirely left to my own 
devices, and spending my time playing with the ragamuf- 
fins in the gutters. 

These are no recollections in the proper sense of the word, 
they are rather traditions which have been handed down 
from year to year by a series of persons bearing my name. 

I do not remember our settling at Questenburg — indeed, 

I cannot imagine the time when the old place was not 
familiar to us. Questenburg is situated in the Hartz re- 
gion, but in a part of it which contradicts all the somber 
and weird notions which are usually awakened by that 
name. It lies in a fertile valley, surrounded by high fir- 
clad hills, and the fields and meadows and orchards are 
broken here and there by steep rocks, covered with luxuri- 
ant verdure. 

We lived in the principal thoroughfare of the old town, 
in a corner house, so placed that from our bay-window one 
couid look up the narrow and tortuous street as far as the 
Geist Kirche , with its fountain surmounted by a quaint 
armed saint; while on the other side one could see the 
trees of the bastions overtopping the gable roofs. This 
bay-window of ours was a splendid thing — a kind of trun- 
cated tower, ending below in a squashed imp with a curly 
tail, and above in a conical cap covered with leaden tiles. 
The window-panes were formed of convex plates of glass 
set in lead; on the sills were red cushions, and from large 
green boxes dangled carnations and convolvulus. 

We were highly considered at Questenburg. We kept 
an old woman-servant ; my sister had a spinet in the bay- 
window, and I wore brown and plum-colored velveteen on 
Sundays— all signs of prosperity in the eyes of the Ques- 
tenburgers. When Ottilie met the burgomaster or the 
pfarrer (parson) or the schoolmaster, these dignitaries 
saluted «her deferentially, and coming out of church she 
was greeted respectfully by every one. People in Questen- 
burg knew that she had been educated as a lady in the 
capital ; some few had even a faint tradition of her resi- 
dence at court, which last, however, was generally treated 
as a myth. What was, however, evident and undeniable 
was that my sister did not resemble in any respects the 
fair inhabitants of Questenburg ; that she neither dressed, 
nor walked, nor talked like any of them; that, in short, 
Ottilie von Craussen was no more like the provincial ladies 
than a meteor is like a street lamp. Could she not speak 


OTTILIE. 


49 


French? Could she not work silk tulips in tambour-work? 
Did she not play the harpsichord and sing Italian canzo- 
nets? Did she not live most genteelly in one of the best 
houses of the town? Was there not always abundance of 
coffee and sugar in her household? And such being the 
case, how could she be regarded otherwise than as a 
superior kind of being by the towns people? Such were 
my notions when I was a little boy ; later I learned that 
whosoever dares to be superior to his or her neighbors, 
very soon becomes the victim of avenging gossip. 

Ottilie taught me to read and to write— a most ungrate- 
ful piece of work, as I was uncommonly slow and dull for 
my age. My sister had, during her residence at court, 
been infected by the educational theories of those days, 
which, holding the mind to be a blank sheet of paper, or 
a piece of shapeless, malleable wax, attempted to lead man 
back to pristine virtue by eschewing everything which 
seemed artificial or pedantic. Besides these fashionable 
views, she had a natural fear of disgusting me entirely 
with every kind of study. This education, undertaken by 
a girl absolutely without experience, pulled on one side by 
the theories in vogue, and on the other by her natural 
good sense, was strange indeed— the drollest mixture of 
pedantry and simplicity, of pedagogical experiments and 
natural inspirations. My sister would not attempt teach 
ing me to read before having awakened in me some love of 
literature, but she found at the same time that, as this 
disposition delayed making its appearance, I was running 
a great risk of remaining illiterate all my life. In the fine 
spring and summer mornings we used to go together to the 
fields in the vicinity of the town, or else we descended 
into the moat, once full of water, often polluted by the 
blood of Swedes and Imperialists, but now converted into 
a pleasant meadow, overhung by the vast elms and lime- 
trees of the ramparts. 

When I was tired of picking flowers and running after 
butterflies, Ottilie made me sit on the grass, pulled a bobbin 
of thread from her reticule, and taught me to make chains 
of violets or of daisies. When this occupation began to bore 
me, she would replace the bobbin in the reticule, and begin 
telling me one of the many stories she was constantly col- 
lecting for my benefit. They were for the most part our 
popular fairy tales; but when, many years later, I chanced 
to hear or to read them in their original form, I was aston- 
ished to find how greatly they differed from my sister’s 
version. It would seem as if her imagination refined and 
beautified all that passed through it ; her knights were more 
gallant and courteous, her ladies more lovely and graceful, 
her fairies more ethereal and charming than the original 


50 


OTTILIE. 


ones, and the palaces and castles of our Marchen looked like 
so many hovels compared with the resplendent structures 
of her fancy. 

Then she sent me to school, but less, I think, for the 
sake of instruction than for that of meeting children of 
my own age. The schoolmaster was the son of the old 
clergyman of the parish, and was himself the father of a 
numerous family. This worthy had aspirations and pre- 
tensions somewhat above those of his tellow -citizens. He 
had been once or twice at the capital, whence he had 
brought an affectation of science and novelty, which pro- 
duced the funniest effect conceivable. Every year he re- 
ceived the most recent scientific encyclopaedia, and a band- 
box containing a white horse-hair wig of the latest fashion. 
He liked coming to see my sister, whom he amused, and 
at the same time bored, with bis interminable pompous 
speeches. The poor, pedantic creature persuaded himself 
that he had made an impression, not only on Ottilie’s 
mind, but likewise on her heart; and his wife having died, 
he one day offered her his heart, his science, and bis wig — 
inestimable gifts which my sister declined with the great- 
est solemnity, waiting till he had left to give vent to her 
merriment with me, who had been listening at the key- 
hole. 

But I am losing the thread of my narrative. 

Soon after our arrival at Questenburg— at least my very 
indistinct recollections make me suppose that it must have 
been in that remote period — my sister became intimate 
with two elderly young ladies of our town nobility. They 
were of most ancient lineage, but poor ; and having been 
unable to ensnare, as others of their rank had done, some 
convenient burgher, they professed the most splendid dis- 
dain for their plebeian society of Questenburg. They lived 
alone with their father, a half -pay officer, and they consid- 
ered as a godsend the arrival of a young lady of their own 
rank— a lady who had even been at court without bringing 
back the insufferable arrogance of the governor’s wife and 
her set. My sister, who was too good and sincere not to 
believe that all others resembled her in this respect, 
thought herself honored by the friendship of these ladies, 
whose age she obstinately believed to be not more than 
twenty-four years, and whose merits she defended val 
iantly against whomsoever dared to question them. These 
young ladies, like Tasso’s Sofronia, “ vergini di gia matura 
verginita,” literally besieged my sister. They were per- 
petually coming to see her, or sending her notes, books, 
pieces of needlework or messages by their old servant, the 
decrepit factotum of their noble house. They were tall, 
spare, and sandy-haired; they dressed strictly in the fash- 


OTTILIE. 


51 


ion, that is to say, in the fashion of twenty years before, 
with a vast hoop and an andrienne embroidered with flow- 
ers as discolored as themselves. They came to my sister at 
all hours of the day; they called her “ dearest Ottilie;” 
they copied her tambour- work patterns ; they carried off her 
books and strummed on her harpischord; but although 
they disturbed and bored her not a little, they adroitly 
managed to get her affection by pretending to have a great 
deal for me. This was Ottilie ’s weak point; she was ready 
to believe in those who pretended to sympathize with her 
tastes, and especially who made a show of loving me. 

But this friendship was not of longj duration. There ar- 
rived one day at Questenburg a cousin of the young ladies, 
a little cavalry officer, whom each of them regarded as her 
own especial prey; and truly this white-faced, fair-haired, 
meek, weak creature ran considerable risk from two such 
determined Amazons. Unfortunately, as they were taking 
a walk with their cousin, they stumbled upon my sister, 
who was taking me out to the bastions. It was impossible 
not to present him to their dearest Ottilie, who received 
him as she received every one, with extreme grace. From 
that moment the young ladies ceased to be secure of their 
prey ; the officer gradually diminished his attentions, fre- 
quented my sister’s walks, and being violently abused 
therefor by his cousins, he ceded to his timid character 
and fled from Questenburg. Of course there could be no 
more thought of friendship between the two young ladies 
and Ottilie, whom they treated as a coquette and a design- 
ing little upstart. They never came to return her books 
nor to strum on her harpsichord, and a cold nod on meet- 
ing at the church door was the only sign of their acquaint- 
ance. 

During the long winter evenings, when the snow beat 
against the lattice, my sister used to read to me some 
book of history or travel, seated on the black horse -hair 
sofa, while I was perched on one of its arms. These 
stories made a vivid impression on my mind, and having 
been presented with a box of colors and two brushes, I 
amused myself drawing the most emotional scenes of Ot- 
tilie’s narratives. A ball with a straight line and three 
dots served as a head, a kind of braided bag as a body, 
and four sticks as legs and arms. If in these paintings 
of mine the human body was not represented with much 
nobility, there was, on the other hand, an excessive dis- 
play of cabbage-trees, of camels, of winged horses, and of 
purple and gold clothes; not to mention the sugar- plums, 
ginger-bread, and other sweets, which I drew of colossal 
proportions. In this fashion I succeeded in obtaining 
sufficiently vivid ideas of all I read and heard ; and I must 


52 


OTTILIE. 


confess that, horrible as it may appear to you, I cannot 
even now read the fourth book of the JSneid without hav- 
ing a vision of two dolls dressed in purple and blue, one of 
whom is evidently narrating some pathetic circumstance 
to the other, who seeks to console him by the offer of 
numerous gigantic sugar-plums. 

I was of a soft disposition, and when the sparrows and 
robins flew against our window-panes, shaking their frozen 
wings, the sight of the poor little sufferers gave me pain — 
an almost physical pain — so I would open the window, and 
throw out on to the sill crumbs of my own bread. At first 
they would not come to fetch it in my presence, later they 
grew accustomed to enter the room boldly, to perch on the 
porcelain stove, and to seek the crumbs on the table. 
These signs of a compassionate nature pleased my sister 
above all things. 

Sometimes when I was in bed I heard her playing the 
harpsichord or singing, and one night I actually rose and 
went in my night-gown to listen at the door. This very 
nearly put a stop to her performances, but finding that I 
took pleasure in music, she merely changed the hour of 
her playing. She had a clear, feeble voice, like so many 
of our women, but she sang in a style very different from 
theirs. She had studied at court under the excellent 
Italians attached to the Electoral chapel. She likewise 
played the harpsichord very well, but I preferred to hear 
her sing; for what child does not care ten times more for 
a tune indifferently hummed than for the most perfect 
key -board gymnastics? To say the truth, I never really 
loved music, despite all the fine phrases I have written 
about it. I would ask my sister to sing for me, and then, 
after a few minutes, I felt bored, and interrupted her with 
some irrelevant question. Nevertheless Ottilie taught me 
some little songs, of which I did not comprehend the 
words in the least, and, as I sang them to my own satisfac- 
tion, I found music less tiresome. 

There is one thing which can be perfectly appreciated 
only as a child, and only in a little German town, and 
that is spring. Ottilie took me out into the fields still 
covered with dew and frost, and we came home laden with 
sprigs of elm and lime covered with tiny leaflets, or with 
twigs of willow covered with fresh rind and grayish, silky 
buds. How we did steal the pear and cherry blossoms ! 
and then the delight of the first strawberries, which the 
peasants brought yet unripe-little, stunted, hard, greenish 
things, tied into bunches with their white blossoms. 

At school I became acquainted with the children of the 
neighborhood, and after lessons I amused myself with 
them— in winter throwing snowballs, making snow men, 


OTTILIE. 


53 


and sliding in the frozen gutters ; in summer beneath the 
flowering, sweet-smelling lime-trees round the Geist 
Kirche. Sometimes they invited me to their houses, where 
I had an opportunity of studying Questenburg society. A 
half-dozen women, dressed with a vast lot of flashy rib- 
bons, sat round a work-table knitting gray woollen stock- 
ings, sipping coffee-dregs, and chattering without intermis- 
sion; the technical name for such an assembly is Kaffee 
Klatsch Gesellschajt — coffee and scandal company. 

In the same room sat the men reading and smoking their 
long pipes, but taking no apparent notice of the female part 
of the society. I, on the contrary, was wonderfully at- 
tracted by the mysterious talk of the women, and I could 
not conceive how my sister could resist the temptation of 
joining in it. One day, however, I discovered with sur- 
prise and horror what was being discussed in these circles. 
The party was in the house of our old pfarrer. He was 
seated near the large porcelian stove, writing his sermon 
and smoking piously ; the women were assembled at the 
opposite end of the room, round a work-table on which 
stood their coffee-cups. Curiosity was stronger than pru- 
dence with me ; I slipped behind a light wooden cupboard, 
at the risk of knocking down the gilt cups and inevitable 
card-board pumpkin which surmounted it. And this is 
what I could make out of their talk. The daughter of the 
pfarrer spoke. 

“ They say, however, that she is of good family ” 

“ Good family, indeed! Good fiddle sticks,” answered 
the burgermeister’s lady. “The daughter of a starving 
lieutenant.” 

Here they lowered their voices, then after a moment : 

“ Fraulein von Craussen,” said the soap-maker’s maiden 
sister, ‘ 1 has lived in too good society to be able to put up 
with ours.” 

“Too good. Too good, do you say?” put in another. 
“Who can tell whether it was too good ? Generally people 
remain in good society when they are a credit to it.” 

“Fraulein von Craussen,” explained the charitable 
schoolmaster’s wife, “ is a very respectable person. Poor 

thing! I fear— hem— that she is a little— hem ” And 

she touched her crimped cap mysteriously with her knit- 
ting-needle. 

“That’s a confounded lie!” politely shouted Kasper, 
nephew of the pfarrer, from his stove corner — “a con- 
founded lie; and you would do much better, I can tell you, 
to mind your own affairs and not meddle with other peo- 
ple’s.” And he puffed angrily at his pipe. 

The matrons were hushed, awe-stricken, for Kasper was 
a burly giant of eighteen, the Esau of his family, and 


54 


OTTILIE. 


Questenburger ladies had no great faith in the chivalry of 
their male relatives. 

This disagreeable adventure of social revelation drew 
my attention to Kasper, and I noticed that we met him 
often in our walks, and in places where neither his gun 
nor his dog could be of any use. At first he avoided com- 
ing up with us, taking some path through the bushes, and 
when this was impossible, he brushed quickly past us, 
saluting awkwardly. When, as was frequently the case, 
the pfarrer’s children made fun of me, and attempted to 
pull me about, Kasper came to the rescue on my behalf. 
Among these children there was one who especially de- 
lighted in mocking and tormenting me; this was the 
notary’s little girl, Wilhelm ine, the prettiest little demon 
imaginable, and already well aware of her charms. She 
pulled me about much worse than the others did ; she beat 
me and pulled my nose and ears most mercilessly. One 
afternoon Kasper saw her thus busied. 

“Let that boy go,” he said, removing his long pipe from 
his mouth. 

Wilhelmine laughed, made a face at him, and pulled my 
ears yet more violently— they had tied me safely, arms 
and legs, to a chair. 

“Let that boy alone,” repeated Kasper, threateningly. 

Again she pulled my ears, and again she made a face at 
him. 

The giant jumped up, threw his pipe aside, and seizing 
Wilhelmine by the waist, carried her shrieking and kick- 
ing to the window. With one strong arm he held her fast 
against his shoulder, while with the other he opened the 
window. 

“Ah, little good-for-nothing!” he cried, in a terrible 
voice, varying from a shrill treble to a cavernous bass, 
“ promise never again to touch that boy, or I pitch thee 
out of the window. ’ ’ 

“Let me go!” shrieked Wilhelmine, kicking frantically. 

‘ ‘ I will never touch him again — never, never ; only let me 
loose, dear, good Herr Kasper— do let me loose.” 

Kasper sat her down. 

“ Kleiner Bengel — little devil,” he said, and proceeded to 
liberate me. 

While he was bending over the chair to which I had been 
bound, Kasper whispered to me, not without a certain 
timidity, “Salute thy sister. Fraulein von Craussen— I 
mean for me. Thou wilt not forget, Christoph?” 

“ Don’t fear,” I answered, and scampered off as fast as I 
could. To tell the truth, the very first thing I did was to 
forget all about Kasper’s message. On returning home I 
found that my sister had made me a beautiful waistcoat, 


OTTILIE, 


55 


olive-colored, with silk flowers, out of an old gala dress of 
hers, and this was quite enough to take all other thoughts 
out of my head. Nevertheless, Kasper did not diminish in 
assiduity toward me. He was a wild, adventurous fellow, 
always scouring the country and rambling into the hills. 
He invariably brought something for me from these expe- 
ditions — a branch of apple -blossom, a bunch of strawber- 
ries, or some queer stone ; and one day he fastened in my 
hat the beautiful wing of a jay which he had recently 
shot. 

“Where did you get that?” asked my sister on remark- 
ing it; and taking my hat, she stroked the delicate gray 
and sea-blue feathers. “ Where did you get that?” 

“Kasper gave it me — Kasper the pfarrer’s nephew,” I 
answered, adding, with some hesitation, “You can’t think 
how nice he is. He makes me presents of all sorts of flow- 
ers and queer stones — he is very good to me.” My con- 
science was stung by the recollection of the way I had neg- 
lected to give the poor fellow’s message. 

“ Why did you not mention him before?” said my sister. 
“ I should like to give him some pleasure in return. Is he 
younger than you?” 

“What!” I exclaimed, “don’t you know Kasper — that 
young man who always bows to us in the wood — that tall, 
fair young man who always carries a gun?” 

The next morning, as we passed through the wood near 
the town, I saw Kasper advancing in the distance down 
the narrow path, slippery with fallen fir-needles. 

“Here he is,” I said to my sister. “Don’t you think 
him good-looking? And they say that he shoots as well as 
the head-forester.” 

Kasper reddened and bowed as usual, and would have 
slipped through the beech-trees, but my Ottilie stopped 
him. 

“I must thank you,” she said, “for jour kindness 
toward Christoph.” 

Kasper cast down his eyes, twirled his cap between his 
finger and thumb, and stammered out gallantly that he 
would have done as much for any one else. 

Ottilie suppressed a smile at the young bear’s civility. 

“I believe,” she said, by way of saying something— for 
she wished to be cordial to my new friend— “I believe 
your uncle intends you to enter the Church, does he not?” 

Kasper sighed, or rather groaned, and answered without 
raising his eyes, and in the most ludicrously lamentable 
tone : 

‘ ‘ Did he tell you that? I am sorry to hear it. ’ ’ 

“ You don’t fancy studying theology, Herr Kasper?” 

Kasper pouted like a scolded child. 


OTTILIE. 


j6 


“ I don’t like staying in the house like an old woman !” 
he exclaimed; “ I like to run about and amuse myself. 
Christoph ’’—and he pointed to me— “ Christoph is quite a 
doctor compared with me.” 

These confidences were uttered with an air of pathetic 
goosishness that surpassed everything. I was disgusted 
with Kasper ; I had hoped that he might make a favorable 
impression on my sister, for her opinion was my touch- 
stone, and I felt humiliated by being under obligations to 
such a booby. Kasper was not worthy of being my pro- 
tector, that much was evident to my precocious conceit. I 
now saw that Kasper was stupid, babyish, and awkward; 
and from this moment I began to treat him in a high and 
mighty way ; to think his attentions rather impertinent, 
and his little presents, his strawberry bunches and feathers, 
a nuisance. I was a graceless, ungrateful little rascal, 
eaten up by vanity. Poor Kasper, already sufficiently de- 
pressed by his sense of stupidity and gawkiness, only re- 
doubled in his efforts at pleasing me. He would sometimes 
come to see us, and my sister always received him well. 
She was grateful for me, and did her best to overcome the 
poor fellow’s shyness, and to make him feel comfortable, 
trying to talk on the subjects on which he might be sup- 
posed to know something, although they bored her to 
death. As to me, with my head full of romance heroes, of 
Achilleses and Rinaldos and Rogers, I regarded Ottilie and 
myself as totally different from the rest of humanity, like 
some sort of mysterious king’s children, and I had a vague 
expectation that some very grand fate, far above anything 
Buestenburg could afford, was lying in store for us. I 
knew Ottilie had been at court, although she rarely alluded 
to it, and I had some confused notion of eventually return- 
ing there in state. 

Perhaps Ottilie might marry a king’s son. I used to lie 
on the grass beneath the lime-trees, my chin in my hands, 
thinking over all the fine doings when the marriage would 
take place: the king’s son in armor, riding a magnificent 
roan charger, and followed by splendidly mounted and 
dressed knights and pages, would come to fetch us — or, 
rather, he would send his mother in a gold coach, that was 
it, and Ottilie would get in and sit by her side, and I oppo- 
site— or they would bring me a splendid horse with a gilt 
bridle, and we should ride through the town, all the peo- 
ple looking out of the windows. That ill-natured burgo- 
master’s wife, how astonished and humbled she would be! 
And that old donkey, the schoolmaster, who had had the 
impudence to propose to Ottilie, what would he look like? 
And I would give a little nod to Kasper. I might get him 
appointed head- forester, or something of that sort. And 


0TT1LIE. 


5 ? 


So, without mentioning it to my sister (what instinct al- 
ways made me keep these visions of glory to myself?) I 
continued to expect the arrival of the king’s son, who was 
to w T ed her. The kings son did finally make his appear- 
ance. He came, however, without either the magnificently- 
caparisoned horses or the gilt coach, and he wore neither 
armor nor brocade nor a full-bottomed wig ; he came on 
foot, wearing the little cap of a student and a large pair of 
top-boots, and proved himself to be no other than Kasper, 
who was setting forth for the university. The poor youth 
was in deep affliction. He sought me as a confidant of his 
woes and of his love. 

“Aha,” I thought, shrewdly, “it’s the grocer’s daugh- 
ter.” The thought never entered my brain that Kasper 
could be so hopelessly mad as to view himself in the light 
of a king’s son. However, with many flourishes and sighs, 
he revealed the whole mystery. He begged and suppli- 
cated me, conjuring me in the name of all the bunches of 
cherries, all the apples, and all the leaden soldiers he had 
given me, to ask my sister whether she would accept him 
as her affianced, and to bring him the answer before the 
diligence started; he would wait for it beneath our win- 
dows. 

I could scarcely restrain my indignation and scorn at 
such a proposal ; still, Kasper had certainly put me under 
obligations, so I refrained, and let him go off without a 
word. 

What should I do? It was mid-day; the diligence 
started at seven in the evening. I could never summon 
up the courage to carry so preposterous a message to my 
sister, to mention to her a proposal so ludicrous and so de- 
rogatory to our station. However, I had tacitly promised 
an answer, I must try and get one. I avoided my sister’s 
presence ; I sat biting my pen-tip, and resolving how best 
to break it to her. I would tell her at dinner. Dinner 
came; I sat opposite to her, shifted my knife and fork, 
knocked the salt out of the salt -cellar, and spilled some 
stewed cherries over the table-cloth, without being able to 
summon up my courage. We finished dinner Avithout my 
having said a word about the matter. How could I ever 
explain to her the boldness of that madman? 

Six o’clock struck; my sister went out to visit the 
burgomaster’s wife. “She will be back in ten minutes,” 
I thought, and went to the window and looked out, wait- 
ing for her return. The half-hour struck and she was not 
back ; a quarter to seven struck slowly, and still no sign 
of her. At that moment Kasper made his appearance be- 
neath the lime-trees in front of the Geist Kirche, his knap- 
sack on his back, his stick in his hand. He advanced 


58 


OTTILIE. 


slowly and stationed himself beneath our window. I re- 
treated precipitately into the room. I could see him look- 
ing up anxiously. I returned to the window ; my eyes met 
his. I had not fulfilled his errand, I had not kept my word ; 
what could be done? “Good-bye, Kasper,” I cried, cheer- 
ily; “good-bye, and may you have a good journey !” And 
I shut the window quickly. He turned and walked away 
rapidly. 

That evening I felt very uncomfortable ; my conscience 
reproached me. Poor Kasper, he had been very friendly 
toward me after all; I was sorry for him. I determined to 
tell Ottilie, and I did. But somehow or other, and almost 
independently of my volition, the story took a ludicrous 
turn. My nervous dread of being involved in Kasper’s ab- 
surd predicament, led me to show him in the most ridicu- 
lous light ; instead of an advocate, I was almost a prose- 
cutor ; and although I kept my word, I certainly did not do 
so to his advantage. 

My sister was very much amused at the story. I, with 
the superficiality and ready contempt of a child, let her see 
only the ludicrous side of the picture; but it had also its 
pathetic one, and I have since thought with repentance of 
the bitter disappointment of the poor, silly boy, making 
his first entrance into the world with only failure and 
scorn as his companions— his first, absurd vision of love 
and poetry made the plaything of a conceited little rascal 
like myself. 


CHAPTER II. 

Years went by— those years which, seen through the 
haze and distance of time, look like the hill-tops gilded by 
the rising sun, all purple and rosy, even if at the moment 
they were bleak and joyless. I no longer lived in my 
world of childish dreams. I thought no more about 
knights’ and kings’ sons : the world was beginning to dis- 
close itself to me, and I was beginning to feel the power to 
see it in its full reality. I ceased also to view Ottilie in the 
same light as before ; she was no longer the fairy, the en- 
chanted princess of former years. She seemed to have un- 
dergone a sudden change, to have become quite a new 
creature. My own level had risen, and only now, as it were, 
could I begin to see fully into her character. 

I was possessed by a sudden and intense curiosity. Dur- 
ing our walks I was constantly remarking new things : the 
magnificent curve of the oak branches, the grand tints of 
the rocks, struck me as if I had never before seen an oak- 
tree, or a rock in my life. The curling lines of the blue- 
bells and the waxen blossoms of the lime-tree arrested my 


0TTIL1E. 


59 


attention; yet how many bluebells had I not plucked be 
fore, how many lime-blossoms had not dropped at my feet 
unnoticed, or noticed, at least, in so different a fashion! 
Those very books which I had formerly devoured merely 
for the sake of the strange and fantastic adventures they 
narrated, were now dear to me only for the sake of the re- 
flection they contained of all this beautiful surrounding 
nature and of the echo I heard in them of the passionate 
energy which filled me. This is the monlent when, as a 
rule, boys— ceasing to be children— seek among those of 
their own years for a chosen companion, with whom to 
enjoy this new life and its dreams— dreams neither of love 
nor of ambition, but of unbounded knowledge, of unlimited 
activity; when their parents’ house begins to appear a 
prison to their eyes, seeking for distant and unattainable 
horizons ; when they instinctively avoid those older than 
themselves, from a consciousness, as it were, that from 
them they would hear that knowledge is finite, activity 
limited, and that in this poor world everything is smaller 
than they think. But this was not the case with me. By 
my side was a companion sympathizing with all my feel- 
ings, willing like myself to view the world like some vast 
park, made for joy and rest. Ottilie was still a young, a 
very young woman, and instead of growing older she 
seemed to grow younger. It was simple enough: hitherto 
she had to act as my mother, now she could become once 
more my sister. Instead of a child who merely loved and 
venerated her, she had now by her side a youth who could 
sympathize with and appreciate her. 

With Ottilie no longer as a teacher, but as a fellow-pupil, 
I made rapid progress in all my studies. She had taught 
me French and Italian; we learned English together, 
English which was then the rage; and, luckily, chance 
sent me a first-rate classical teacher. It was a rare piece 
of good-luck to find so learned and so unpedantic a scholar 
in uncultured, pedantic Questenburg, which, for literature 
and philosophy, had never got beyond Gellert’s hymns and 
Gottsched’s lucubrations. 

Dr. Willibald was a bright, little, shriveled up old man, 
who had been for many years tutor in one of the noble 
families of our neighborhood, and had since the comple- 
tion of his pupils’ education, established himself at Ques- 
tenburg, where he lived on a miserable pittance. He in- 
habited two little rooms in the gabled attic of a joiner’s 
house. During the winter he was wont to remain in bed 
till mid-day, and to go to bed again at sunset, in order to 
save firewood, and he put up with the coarse fare of the 
joiner’s table. Nevertheless, Willibald was something of an 
Epicurean and an epicure ; he had a few straw -bottomed 


60 


OTTILIE. 


chairs and scarcely a bit of mat in his little attic, but he 
always sat in a vast green leather arm-chair, and wrapped 
his legs in a comfortable fur-lined cloak. 

He had some of the finest tulips and hyacinths I have 
ever seen, and I truly think that whatever fire he made in 
the winter was more on their account than on his own. 
He had also a few good engravings after famous pictures, 
and a small collection of handsomely bound books of choice 
editions. In the summer mornings he was wont to go and 
poke about in the market, to enjoy at least the sight of the 
pears and melons and peaches in the baskets, but he never 
bought more than a kreutzer worth of hard cherries or 
sour currants, with which he returned home in great con- 
tentment. The poor fellow’s favorite theory was that to a 
superior mind the mere sight of fruit or poultry or cakes is 
quite enough— “it sets the imagination to work, and the 
pleasures of the imagination are worth more than those of 
the senses. ’ ’ 

My sister was much amused by his philosophy, and often 
sent him fruit and cakes of her own baking, in order, she 
said, to convert him from such heresy. Despite his rather 
humble circumstances, Dr. Willibald considered that to be 
his pupil was a high privilege ; and he was not so far wrong. 
He was a very cultivated man— cultivated according to the 
notions of the old school ; his culture smacking a little of the 
dancing-school and drawing-room— very Frenchified, very 
dandified, very full of little graceful affectations, and with 
the gallantry of a Dresden china shepherd. The ancient 
writers he was well acquainted with, but did not really 
enjoy much, except indeed Horace, who he said was a 
modern and an homme d ' 1 esprit. He would make apologetic 
comments on Homer and JEschylus, trying to give their ex- 
pressions a little more grace and elegance when translating 
them for my sister. 

He regretted their barbarism and want of wit, and in his 
heart of hearts would have given all Homer, with all Ari- 
osto and Tasso into the bargain, for a canto of the ‘ ‘ Hen- 
riade.” The English he esteemed as an original people, but 
they too were sad barbarians, with their contempt for the 
three unities, their stage-ghosts, and their sending away of 
ladies after dinner, which he had witnessed on his travels. 
The Germans he considered as utterly hopeless boors, ped 
ants and clowns, and he viewed with horror their attempt 
to emancipate their literature from imitation of the French. 
Klopstock, Ottilie’s favorite, had to be hidden away on his 
appearance ; and as to Lessing, he had written a whole vol- 
ume in refutation of his pestilent “ Drammaturgie. ” 

These opinions of Willibald’s were the cause of frequent 
squabbles between us, for, as I grew up, some of the works 


OTTILIE. 


61 


of our new literary school fell into my nands and excited 
my enthusiasm. “ Gotz von Berlichingen ’ ’ especially de- 
lighted me ; for months I thought of nothing but knights 
and ladies and secret tribunals, and eagerly poked into 
every ruined castle of the neighborhood. The consequence 
was that Willibald got into a violent rage, threw his beau- 
tiful Elzevir Lucretius at my head, and was induced to re- 
sume the lessons only by Ottilie’ s entreaties. The old feT 
low was, moreover, horribly impatient, and had a look 
which set all declensions and conjugations whizzing wildly 
through my brain, so that no power of will could settle 
them in their places. I had little facility in learning any 
sort of lesson, and had my sister not worked at the Latin 
and Greek grammars, and privately examined me in them, 
Willibald would soon have given up teaching me. On Sun- 
days and holidays W illibald invariably came to take coffee 
with us, dressed" in his best and with his most graceful little 
airs and affectations. 

My sister, who knew his foibles, used herself to bake de- 
licious cinnamon cakes for him ; and these, united to her 
good coffee, rejuvenated him marvelously, and inspired 
him with the most poetical flights of enthusiasm. He 
sometimes brought Ottilie a present of flowers and fruit, 
which he pretended to have got by accident, but which we 
well knew had been bought out of his miserable little sav- 
ings. These gifts pained Ottilie dreadfully, but she hid her 
feelings, and received them with apparent perfect pleasure 
and unsuspiciousness, knowing that poor people sometimes 
indulge in presents as a luxury, and that you can afford 
them as much pleasure by receiving with gratitude as by 
giving with grace. W illibald was sometimes rather a bore, 
quoting Latin, talking French, putting on all sorts of absurd 
little airs of gallantry, and boasting of his great acquaint- 
ances; but he was so simple and childish withal that it was 
impossible not to like him. When he had taken his coffee 
and his cakes (he was always given §ome to take home, 
on the supposition that he had shown no appetite), and 
when he had made his compliments and told his anecdotes, 
the little old gentleman would draw from a case an old 
battered instrument called a viola da gamba (“the favorite 
instrument of my dear friend the late Prince Nicholas 
Esterhazy , heigh-ho !’ ’ he would always inform us), on which 
he performed very tolerably. 

He was passionately fond of music, used to boast of hav- 
ing been the intimate friend of the famous chapel- master 
ITasse, and his wife, “ the Faustina;” and his great delight 
was to play to Ottilie’s accompaniment. Once or twice I 
took up the German flute and tried to join in the perform- 
ance, but Willibald speedily began to scream at my mis- 


G2 


0TTIL1E. 


takes and call me a Hun and a Vandal, and drove me away 
from the spinet. So I settled myself in the large arm- 
chair by the stove, and read, or tried to read, raising my 
head every now and then to enjoy the absurd gestures and 
grimaces of Willibald, who, his fiddle on his knee, wielded 
his bow with fury, hummed snatches of melody, and 
twisted and jerked on his chair till the powder flew from 
his horse-hair wig. Willibald professed the highest respect 
and admiration for Ottilie, respect and admiration almost 
equal to that which he felt for himself. “A beautiful soul 
quelle belle ame /” he would exclaim, raising his eyes and 
smacking his lips. “ What a divine woman ! No, nowhere 
will you find a woman with such a soul for poetry, such a 
nymph-like bearing, who is such a splendid accompanist 
and such an unrivaled maker of cinnamon cakes!” 

One spring morning, when I was between fourteen and 
fifteen, I met for the first time a visitor in Dr. Willibald’s 
attic. He was a man of uncertain age, but still youngish, 
tall, well-made, dark, with strongly marked, handsome 
features. He was elegantly dressed, with traveling boots, 
and his hair tied behind in a silk bag. I saw at a glance 
that he was no Questenburger. On my appearance he rose 
and took leave of my master. 

“Who is that?” I asked, much astonished, as Willibald 
returned from escorting the stranger to the head of the 
stairs. 

“That?” answered the old gentleman, with a look of in- 
effable scorn. “.That?” 

And he proceeded to explain, with many contemptuous 
shrugs and grimaces, that his visitor was a certain Moritz, 
a youngster with a smattering of learning and a great deal 
of conceit, who had weedled himself into the favor of the 
elector, who had made him a court councilor, and had 
sent him to Italy to buy pictures and statues for him ; “ a 
fellow full of new-fangled notions, but without a grain of 
sense in his head,” paid Willibald. This Moritz had, it ap- 
peared, inherited some property near Questenburg, and 
was engaged in a lawsuit concerning it. He had brought 
Willibald a letter from a friend of his in the capital — with 
whom the little old man was, or pretended to be, in great 
wrath for sending him such a fellow. Further Willibald 
could not inform me. During this first visit there must 
have been some literary or philosophical rub between 
himself and the stranger, for he seemed very much out of 
humor. 

Returning home from my lesson I met the worthy school- 
master, who was in a flurry of excitement about this very 
Councilor Moritz; for Moritz was, he informed me with 
deep awe, a famous man in the capitol; and all famous 


OTTILIE. 


63 


men of the capitol were so many gods of Olympus for our 
schoolmaster. Moritz had been sent to Italy by the 
elector, and had stayed there five years. He had written 
books and edited prints of antiquities ; but what the books 
were about no one at Questenburg could tell. Five years in 
Italy ! I exclaimed within myself ; and my interest in Coun- 
cilor Moritz increased all of a sudden amazingly. How 
much I would give to know a person who had been in Italy 
—who had seen with his own eyes the Forum, the Capitol, 
Vesuvius, the woods of orange, the vine -wreathed elms, 
the sea ! The sea ! — that wonderful thing which I was never 
destined to behold. All that strange fascination of the un- 
known South which we Germans have inherited from our 
barbarian ancestors, which sent down Alaric and Alboin as 
destroyers, and Winckelmann and Goethe as rebuilders of 
antiquity — all this awakened in my mind. Moritz had 
been in Italy ; I must know him. As I turned a street cor- 
ner I met the councilor. He seemed to recognize me, but 
continued his walk. Instinctively I looked after him; I 
did not venture to address him, yet how many questions 
rose up to my lips. It never entered my mind that Willi- 
bald might be misinformed or prejudiced, and that the 
stranger might be anything but a lucky upstart ; but he 
had been in Italy, and that was merit enough in my eyes. 

Next morning, passing across the little square which 
surrounds the Geist Kirche, I saw Councilor Moritz seated 
under .one of the large flowering lime-trees. I approached, 
hung about with an air of indifference, pretended to be 
waiting for some one, walked up and down in hopes of his 
remarking me, for in my conceit I thought I was a very 
striking youth. Moritz was reading some letters, and did 
not once look up from them. I grew desperate ; the wooden 
bench was long, so I summed up courage and sat down on 
the extreme edge of it, as far as possible from the coun- 
cilor. At length he folded his papers, put them in his 
pocket, and looked in my direction. His dark, handsome 
face bore a slight expression of amusement. I do believe 
that -he had remarked all my dodges and guessed at their 
motive. I reddened, and lifted my hat. He slightly 
touched his in return, and, always with the same perturb- 
ing look of suppressed amusement, asked me whether I was 
not the pupil of Dr. Willibald. I could have sworn that he 
had heard all the old gentleman’s sarcastic remarks about 
himself, for his face bore the queerest look of dry humor. 
I felt more and more uncomfortable, and answered his 
questions concerning my studies in anything but a striking 
manner. At length I lost all patience and prudence, and 
remarked : 

“ You have been in Italy lately?” 


64 


OTTILIE. 


Moritz understood ; perhaps he may have remembered 
his own feelings as a youth, before Italy had become more 
than a mere delightful dream for him. 

“Yes,” he answered, “I have come almost straight 
from Rome;” and sparing me the embarrassment of ques- 
tioning him on his stay there, he began to talk about Italy 
and its wonders; and ended by telling me that if I cared to 
see some prints and drawings he had brought back with 
him, I might come to his inn the next morning. 

I related my adventure exultingly to my sister, and the 
next morning, dressed in my holiday suit, went to seek my 
new acquaintance at the Inn of the Three Kings. Coun- 
cilor Moritz occupied the best suit (if suit it might be 
called) in the old, brown, rickety inn; the sign swung 
beneath his windows, and the lime-trees pushed their 
flowers against his panes. I was received by a demure, 
dark lad, the councilor’s valet. He could not understand 
a word of German, so I very grandly addressed him in my 
home-learned Italian, which must have sounded strange 
indeed to his Roman ears. Moritz was busy with his 
lawyer, but he bade me enter, and produced a portfolio of 
beautiful prints and drawings of Italian scenery and 
antiquities. These were the first reproductions of antique 
works of art that had fallen into my hands. At first I felt 
puzzled, and did not well know what to feel or think about 
them. I was glad the councilor was busy with his lawyer, 
for I knew I should find nothing to say about them. 
Mechanically I turned over page after page, and looked at 
statue after statue; those large, round-limbed, motionless 
white figures, with their pupilless eyes, were so different 
from all I had ever seen before, or been accustomed to 
think beautiful — so different from Willibald’s smooth and 
finikin French engravings after Mignard and Watteau, 
whose delicate execution had hitherto been my delight. 
I felt stupid and strange. The lawyer left ; Moritz came 
up to me, prevented my rising, and looking over my 
shoulder at the engravings, said simply, “Well?” 

I raised my eyes, not knowing what to answer. He 
looked at me with the same air of amusement — “You 
don’t like them?” 

I reddened and stammered. 

“ You don’t like them?” he repeated. I felt that he was 
laughing at me. He had seen my enthusiasm for Italian 
things, and now that I had them before me I looked like a 
fool. I summoned up courage. 

“I have never seen such things before,” I answered, 
boldly. “I don’t know whether I like them or not.” 

“ Do you know Latin and Greek?” he asked me. 

“’Yes,” I answered. 


0TTIL1E. * 65 

“ Have you ever read Homer?” 

I nodded. 

“ Ho you know whether you like him or not?” 

The question seemed like an insult. I raised my head, 
and my face said more than my words. 

‘ 4 Homer is not like these , ’ ’ I answered, quickly. 4 4 These 
are dead. His heroes live and act and suffer; I care for 
them. These are doing nothing; they have no eyes, they 
are asleep or dead.” 

Moritz looked at me for the first time with interest. He 
went to a shelf and took down a book. 

“Have you read this?” he asked, handing it to me. 

“No,” I answered. It was Lessing’s 44 Laocoon.” 

44 Take it home and read it,” he said; “and then if you 
care to see the prints again, come to me. ’ ’ 

I was bewildered. 1 took the book, thanked him, and 
went home. 

Well, I read the “Laocoon;” it did not at first convert 
me, but it opened my eyes to the existence of an antique 
world of which Willibald, with all his knowledge of 
Greek and Latin, knew nothing. I returned to Coun- 
cilor Moritz, saw his prints again, talked over them with 
him, was lent one volume after another of Winckelmann’s 
great books, and little by little became a fervent admirer 
of antiquity and of the man who was its expounder to me. 
The councilor might well afford to smile at what he knew 
to be Willibald’s opinions concerning him; he was a man 
of quite another character, of quite another school ; one of 
those who were destined to demolish the false classic ideal 
of the French, by means of what was far more potent than 
all the romantic dramas, and secret tribunals, and armed 
knights of the whole romantic school— by the comprehen- 
sion of real, genuine antiquity. 

Moritz was an ardent proselyte of Winckelmann ; he was 
himself a writer on art, possessing much learning and 
acumen. This I discovered only after some time, when he 
lent me a delightful journey in Italy, which turned out to 
be by himself. My sister, who had followed my mental 
adventures with deep interest, read the book and was de- 
lighted with it, and she became very curious to see the 
great man in person. I, too, was extremely desirous to 
bring my hero to Ottilie, and at the same time show 
her off to him, for I felt sure he must admire her. But it 
seemed next to impossible to bring about a meeting be- 
tween them. We occasionally saw him at a distance, 
but, somehow or other, there was no meeting him. The 
fact was— and I understood it as soon as I began to men- 
tion my sister to Moritz— that the councilor dreaded 
nothing so much as being bored, and held no creature in 


GO ' OTTILIE. 

greater horror than the female inhabitant of a provincial 
town. 

At length, finding him impervious to all insinuations, I 
proposed taking him to our house with so much directness 
that he could not possibly refuse. My sister would have 
been horribly mortified and angry at my want of delicacy, 
but I did not care. So, one morning, I had the triumph 
of preceding the councilor on our wooden staircase, and of 
rushing into the kitchen, where my sister was making tarts, 
with the exulting exclamation. “Here he is!” I returned 
to our little parlor, where I had left the councilor. What 
might be his impressions of our abode? I asked myself , with 
anxiety ; and for the first time a sense of our poverty came 
over me. The dear little room seemed rusty and mean, for 
the furniture was faded, and whatever ornaments it could 
boast were worn and old-fashioned ; I felt ashamed. The 
councilor’s impression was less harsh than mine. He told 
me, long afterward, that in this modest, homely little 
room he had at once perceived a something— an indefinable 
something — in the arrangement of chairs and tables and 
flower-pots, in the looks of books and prints, that revealed 
refinement and a habit of elegance quite unknown in our 
good town of Questenburg. My sister, instead of keeping 
Moritz waiting while she made a hurried and ostentatious 
toilet, as most women would have done, thought it more 
civil not to delay ; she unrolled her sleeves, removed her 
kitchen apron, and in less than a minute made her appear- 
ance. Yet she looked elegant and dignified, and Moritz 
was evidently surprised at such an unexpected apparition 
as that of a refined, handsome, and intelligent woman, still 
young, and in some respects almost girlish, when he had 
expected a coarse, stupid Questenburger dame. Ottilie 
began conversation with perfect ease ; and for the first time 
I became aware how complete a woman of the world she 
was, she who for eight years had seen only schoolmasters’ 
and burgomasters’ wives. 

Moritz stayed a good time. When he had left I impa- 
tiently asked my sister what she thought of him ; and here 
again I was surprised, for, although she did ample justice 
to his intelligence and manners, the councilor was by no 
means so unique a phoenix in her eyes as in mine. 

Moritz eagerly snatched at this unexpected alleviation 
of what to him was exile in a barbarous country, and not 
only returned to our house, but came often, very often, 
until he could come no oftener for fear of setting all the 
tongues in Questenburg chattering. He seemed to take 
more and more pleasure in my sister’s conversation, and 
perhaps he discovered even in me something that awak- 
ened his interest. Dr. Willibald was at first furious at 


OTTILIE. 


67 


“ the upstart’s insolence,” but when he had met the coun- 
cilor once or twice at our house, even he had to admit 
that after all the elector might have been justified in dis- 
tinguishing Moritz— “ although he knows nothing what- 
ever about antiquities,” the old gentleman always put in 
as a saving clause. 


I These summer months of the year 1782 were a delightful 
period in our lives, and I believe no less so in that of Coun- 
I cilor Moritz. His conversation was fascinating, so full of 
ideas and images, always bright with new theories and new 
views, rich in description and anecdote — altogether far 
superior to any of his writings, excellent as some of them 
are. He had traveled much and seen much, and had 
known many famous persons, whose manners and mode of 
speaking he could reproduce in a masterly fashion. And 
his pictures of Roman society and of the papal court were 
as racy and lifelike as his accounts of statues and pictures 
were eloquent. After having sadly confused all poor Will- 
ibald’s sesthetical and antiquarian notions, he would put 
the old fellow into a state of rapture by describing his 
Roman life — the climate, the sunshine, the villa gardens, 
the grand receptions, and, above all, the great musical per- 
formances for which Italy was then (may I say it is still? — 
1809) unique. The councilor gave my sister a great num- 
ber of new pieces by the first Italian masters which he had 
brought with him, and which he enjoyed hearing her per- 
form, for music was one of the many luxuries which had 
‘become necessary to him, and my sister sang and played 
really well. In this intellectual atmosphere, my studies, 
with Moritz’ additional assistance, progressed rapidly, and 
thus added to our general happiness. 

Well, we were all four of us very happy, too conscious 
of happiness to remain so long. Little by little I began to 
be aware of a change ; was it in myself or in my surround- 
ings? I cannot tell, but I felt it nevertheless, painfully. 
It was like the first gentle motion of a boat ; the traveler 
can scarcely say whether it is he or the shore that is mov- 
ing, and if he abandon himself to the impression he be- 
comes filled with an indefinable discomfort. Gradually 
the feeling became stronger; it was as if I was being pushed 
by imperceptible degrees out of the circle occupied by 
Ottilie and the councilor. They were getting nearer each 
other, and I proportionately further and further from 
both. Yet there was not the slightest coldness or diminu- 
tion of affection on the part of my sister. I was still what 
I had always been for her, but— but another was becom- 
ing, not indeed what I had been, but something quite dif- 
ferent and superior in her affection. I felt all this long be- 
fore I could explain it to myself ; out, when I did explain it. 


68 


OTTILIE. 


the feeling became insupportable to my excessively sensi- 
tive and egotistic nature, rendered morbidly jealous by 
having been my sister’s sole thought, her life, her tyrant. 
What was I now? Merely her brother. 

I was at once effeminate and passionate in temper, re- 
quiring constant caresses and flatteries, and capable of furi- 
ous outbursts if denied them. A strange mixture of the 
child and of the man— I, who ought to have been simply a 
boy. Feeling as a child, I felt overcome by heart-breaking 
loneliness ; I would have cried and sobbed and forced my 
sister to soothe me. Feeling as a man, I despised my 
morbid affection, and would have looked at everything 
with almost brutal indifference. I had moments of the bit- 
terest weakness, and others of the most stubborn stolidity. 
At one moment I could scarcely refrain from throwing my- 
self into my sister’s arms and entreating her to send away 
Moritz. At another I was ready to tell the councilor' that 
he was free to take Ottilie, that I did not care what she 
did, that I wished only for liberty. At times jealousy 
would drive me out of the house, and I would throw my- 
self sobbing on the grass of the ramparts. At others I sat 
buried in my books, answering rudely and insultingly 
whatever remark was made to me. And I was for a long 
time the only one who suspected the real state of matters. 
Neither Ottilie nor Moritz realized their feelings toward 
each other, and old Willibald was blinder than either of 
them. But the extraordinary change which had come 
over me was unmistakable; there was no possibility of 
being blind to my melancholy, my sulkiness, and my out- 
bursts of violence. 

Ottilie, incapable of solving the riddle, asked the coun- 
cilor’s advice on the subject. The cold, resolute, unsen- 
timental man laughed at it all, and told her to send me to 
school if she would cure me. “He has been spoiled,” I 
heard him say; and from that moment I hated him im- 
placably. 

Thus the summer advanced; the lawsuit which kept 
Moritz at Questenburg drew to a close, and every day his 
feelings and those of my sister became stronger, and my 
jealousy more violent. And now, as the moment of part- 
ing approached, both the councilor and Ottilie discovered 
that that parting must never take place ; that they could 
no longer be easily separated, but must be violently 
wrenched from each other. I looked on fiercely and pre- 
pared for a final struggle. A struggle, a battle it must be; 
there could be no compromise between me and Moritz ; he 
was determined to make Ottilie his wife, but, as he declared 
before me, after one of my fits of jealous rage, his wife must 
be his and solely his. Me he considered as a spoiled and 


OTTILIE. 


6*9 


morbid child, whose jealous susceptibility he despised all 
the more as he himself, a self-made man, had never re- 
ceived any kind treatment in his own lonely childhood. 

“ Christoph, ” he said, “ can be only one of two things to me 
— my son, or a stranger. As my son I shall insist on his being 
sent abroad and cured of this ridiculous morbidness, that 
he go into the world and there harden his absurd over- 
sensitive character ; in this case I shall be acting for his 
own good. If, on the contrary, you refuse to let me deal ^ 
with him as a son, I can regard him only as an intruder, 
and his sentimental folly as a nuisance, and I shall be 
forced to keep him at a distance. I will permit of no middle 
course, I will endure no division of authority in my 
house.” 

Moritz spoke calmly, decidedly, but without any harsh- 
ness ; he had good sense on his side, and knew that while 
thus acting for his own dignity and peace, he would also be 
acting for my eventual good. I had been seated gloomily 
during his speech ; when he had done, I rose, and striking 
the table, I cried, hoarsely : 

“ Councilor Moritz, I would rather die than be your son! 
In your house I never will stay one hour. Nor need you 
fear any intrusion. If my sister becomes your wife, I re- 
nounce her, and never wish to see her again. Let her 
choose between us.” 

Moritz did not look at all angry, but merely burst out 
laughing. 

“ My poor child,” he said, “ you shall be sent to school.” 

“We shall see that!” I cried, fiercely, and involuntarily 
raised my arm against him. The councilor merely 
switched across my knuckles with his cane ; I cried out 
with rage. 

“Moritz,” cried Ottilie, white with pain and fear, 

“ please go; I cannot speak to you now.” 

“ You must decide sooner or later,” he insisted. “By 
delaying you merely expose yourself to repetitions of this 
disgusting childish nonsense.” 

“Decide!” I exclaimed, my eyes flashing; “ I am ready 
to leave this house to-morrow, to-day, this very hour, the 
moment it becomes his house.” 

My sister was in perfect agony. 

“Councilor Moritz,” she repeated, “I entreat you to 
go away. I cannot speak further on the subject at this 
moment.” 

The councilor took his hat and cane. 

“I go since you desire it,” he said, bowing slightly, and 
fixing his eyes on her discomposed face. “ I will not urge 
that my own happiness is at stake ; but let me add, that in 
throwing aside a man who loves you and is worthy of you, 


70 


OTTILIE. 


in sacrificing your own future, you will also be compromis- 
ing the future of this foolish, headstrong child, and that 
your yielding to this momentary madness will cost both 
you and him dear in future years. It is only in healthy 
independence that he can be really happy, and you wiil 
discover the truth of it when your happiness be broken, to- 
gether with his. 1 ’ 

And the councilor left the room. 

My sister had to choose, and she made her choice. Mo- 
ritz, without once losing his calm self possession, appealed 
to her reason, to her affection fo> himself ; I went on like 
one mad, entreating and threatening, and thus for one 
miserable, most miserable week. At the end of it, one 
dreary October morning, a traveling carriage drove up to 
the Three Kings; the councilor’s luggage was packed on 
to it, and he left Questenburg for Munich, whence he was 
to proceed back to Rome. And that whole summer, which 
had seemed to us so short, and yet formed so deep a chasm 
in our lives, was never mentioned in our conversation. We 
resumed our former solitary life as if it had never been in- 
terrupted ; but Ottilie was graver and a little melancholy, 
and I felt sometimes as if I had committed some great 
crime. A vague wish to leave Questenburg came over me, 
but I suppressed it and never let Ottilie suspect its exist- 
ence. Once or twice, in this state of vague discontent, a 
fear entered my mind; could the councilor’s prediction 
prove a true one? 


CHAPTER III. 

When I had completed my nineteenth year I left 
Questenburg for the first time. My sister had for years 
been saving up money to send me to th6 university — money 
which had cost her many a privation, and every thaler of 
which had been put by with the bitter thought it brought 
her nearer to the day when for the first time we should 
be separated, when for the first time she would be 
left quite alone. But she never let a word of regret 
escape her lips; and when she w^as stooping over my 
trunk, the day before my departure, and I thought I saw 
tears on her face, and raised her up and kissed her, unable 
to speak, she tried to smile and assume an air of perfect 
cheerfulness. 

I had longed to see the world, and when I had got over 
the pang of separation, enjoyed my journey, my entry into 
a new life, amazingly. But when fairly settled at the uni- 
versity I began to see things less cheerfully. I was poor, 
timid, inexperienced, and horribly sensitive ; I had been 
educated by a woman and had almost acquired a woman’s 


OTTILIE. 


71 


delicacy and susceptibility, and all a woman’s habits of 
order, of quiet, of subdued intellectual life; and such I 
found myself thrown among a lot of vigorous and manly, 
but excessively wild and undisciplined, youths. I felt at 
once dislike, contempt, and fear of these young men, and 
they in return regarded me with no friendly eyes, calling 
me a sneak and a Frenchman, for our national feeling was 
then at the highest, at least in literary matters. So I kept 
out of their way as much as possible, and became engrossed 
in my studies. 

What was particularly melancholy was that my means 
did not permit of my spending my holidays at Questenburg, 
on account of the very long and expensive journey, so that 
these years seemed like an unbroken period of exile. I 
cared for my studies, for the approval of the professors ; 
but what I cared most for were Ottilie’s letters, and the 
post-days were my happiest. Thus I continued for a couple 
of years, till at length physical and mental weariness 
forced me out of my habits of solitude and study, and made 
me seek, despite myself, the once-despised company of my 
fellow- scholars. It was the year 1788, in that time of 
morbid, feverish, and almost delirious intellectual life, 
which took its name from Klinger's famous play of ‘ ‘ Sturm 
und Drang.” Wild and stormy that generation truly was; 
the most absolute contempt and loathing for everything 
long established and formal, an intense admiration for in- 
dividual freedom as opposed to social institutions, a frantic 
desire to return to brute nature, an unbridled striving after 
originality, allied to wholesale and uncriticizing imitation, . 
a boiling and seething of all things good and bad, which 
filled our literature with paradoxes of all kinds, the strangest 
of all being the co-existence of absurd whimpering senti- 
mentalism by the side of a disgusting love of horrors; such 
was our literary atmosphere, out of which only a very few 
men were of sufficient mental stature to raise their heads. 
The university at which I was happened to be a perfect 
hot-bed of the self-styled geniuses of whom those years 
were so prolific, and I found myself thrown on to the 
society of a number of crazy youths given up to what they 
were pleased to call “the life of genius.” 

There was little study, and the lessons of the appointed 
professors were a mere farce. At the same time there was 
a tremendous ferment of literary, philosophical, and social 
theories, of which some of the opening scenes of Schiller’s 
“Kobbers” give the best notion. Here was a wholesale 
manufactory of Ossianesque poems, in which every species 
of platitude was whimpered or bawled out in the name of 
the supposed bards, at that time closely connected with an- 
cient Teuton warriors ; there (I mean in some other corner 


72 


OTTILIE. 


of the university) were established so many workshops for 
the production of romantic tragedies, in which paradoxes, 
hyperboles, murders, seductions, and abominations of all 
sorts were heaped together, till it seemed as if a poet was 
to be valued according to the number of people whom he 
slaughtered on the stage. These plays very naturally pro- 
voked the censure of the professors, who looked upon all 
this genius-life as a dangerous nuisance, and thence arose 
perpetual feuds between them and the students, whose 
common episodes were riots in the lecture- rooms, cat-ser- 
enades under the professors’ windows, and incarcerations, 
When I arrived at the university an absurd story was 
afloat about a sister institution at a neighboring town, 
Avhere it was said that some of the most intrepid among 
the stormy students had resolved to assassinate a pecu- 
liarly obnoxious old doctor of philosophy ; that they had 
cast lots as to who was to execute this heroic deed, and 
that, the plot having been discovered, the conspirators had 
fled from the university, formed a gang . in a neighboring 
forest, and had become the terror of the district, after the 
fashion of Karl Moor and his comrades. 

Besides these dramatic authors, who went about in rags, 
and swaggered over the atrocities they daily invented, 
there was a class of milder and better-conducted students, 
well-born and delicately-nutured youths, who were suffer- 
ing from the fever of sentimentalism, lyric poets, imita- 
tors of Ossian and of Klopstock. They were always weep- 
ing in verse and ended by weeping in prose. After trying 
to make others believe that they were the victims of some 
mysterious fate, and consumed by some unknown ill, they 
got to believe it themselves. Suicide was common among 
them, at least theoretically, and some of the poor creatures 
really ended in mad -houses. For a long time I tried to 
steer clear of both categories, and to fortify myself 
against the prevalent malady by serious study and constant 
correspondence with my sister ; but at length I too was car- 
ried along by the current. I never, indeed, had any sym- 
pathy for the bloodthirsty tragedians, but the melancholy 
lyrists gradually attracted me. The soft, moonlight-tinted, 
suicidal melancholy of these young men was not without 
something pleasing and poetical, at least to my mind as it 
was then situated ; they praised some very doleful elegies 
of mine, showed deep sympathy for the general depres- 
sion produced by overwork* and altogether made me ten 
times more dismal, homesick, and forlorn than I had 
been before. The sentimental epidemic soon declared 
itself in me. I felt the necessity of solitude, and was soon 
the prey of a mysterious grief, of despair, without the very 
faintest ground or msoib No Charlotte happening to 


OTTILIE. 


73 


cross my path, nor indeed any other lady who might ac- 
count for this condition unto myself (the citizen’s daugh- 
ters were hopelessly vulgar in my eyes), I permitted an 
intense desire to see my sister again to lay hold of me ; nay, 
I did all I could to foster this foolish and artificial home- 
sickness. Soon it became impossible for me to think of 
Ottilie without being oppressed by grief and the remem- 
brance of every trifling detail of my Questenburg life 
made the tears come into my eyes. To assuage my grief, I 
wrote some elegies on the subject, which elegies, according 
to the habit of heart-broken poets, I took good care to 
print. 

My melancholy was not, however, a pretense ; far from 
it. It is impossible to conceive the effect on a nervous 
person of a long residence in a mental atmosphere heavy 
with sickly sentiment. More than once, as I walked on 
the banks of the river, tearing the grass and flowers with 
my stick as I went along, I have stopped suddenly, re- 
mained gazing at the water, until I was seized by an al- 
most irresistible impulse to throw myself into the eddy- 
ing stream. My friends viewed me with interest and 
admiration ; for these morbid creatures I had the double 
attraction of being a hero and a psychological study. 
They whispered that I always carried a bottle of laudanum 
on me — others contended that it was a pistol, and that 
they had actually seen its muzzle protruding out of my 
pocket — and there was a general expectation that some fine 
day I should be found lying lifeless among the sedge on the 
riverside, or weltering in a pool of blood in my study. Many 
of them were ready prepared to weep my untimely end in 
fender elegies, or to develop my story in a whimpering 
novel. Unfortunately for these literary projects my tale 
was destined to have a different catastrophe, and one 
which would have intensely disgusted these romanticists. 
The longing to return to Ottilie became irresistible. I felt 
that my only means of cure lay in sacrificing all— univer- 
sity, education, literary career, fame, everything, in order 
to return to Questenburg ; and in this mad condition all 
these sacrifices seem to add to the efficacy of the cure. 
Without saying a word to any one, I paid what small debts 
I had, made a bundle of my books and clothes (most that 
were too bulky I simply and heroically left behind), and 
set out on foot for Questenburg. It was an essential feat- 
ure of this crazy plan that the immense journey should be 
made on foot, at the risk of being robbed or falling ill on 
the wayside, eating little and avoiding human habitations 
as far as possible. My sentimental fever had reached the 
stage of delirium • but this stage was its last, and precluded 
recovery. 


74 


OTTILIE. 


After a journey of many days in broiling August weather, 
exhausted by an effort so entirely beyond my forces — for I 
was not a good walker — and in a state of violent excitement, 
I at length reached Questenburg. Instead of entering the 
town at once, I stopped some hours at a little inn on the 
outskirts, waiting for dusk before finishing my journey. 
Imagine the amazement, the horror of my sister, who 
thought I was studying comfortably at B , when I sud- 

denly walked into the kitchen, covered with dust, unshaven, 
my clothes and shoes in tatters, and looking altogether as 

if Beally I don’t know what possible circumstances 

could explain my appearance. Ottilie’s first thought, 
rapid as lightning, w T as that I had been expelled, or obliged 
for some unknown reason to run away from the university, 
and she received me with every expression of affection and 
anxious sympathy. I wanted to explain all at once, but 
she would not listen ; she insisted on my putting on clean 
clothes, resting and eating first, for I was evidently sink- 
ing from exhaustion. When I had got on fresh things, 
and had rested awhile, and put my sore and bruised feet 
.into soft slippers, she spread a napkin, and placed knife 
and fork and glass on the table, in front of the sofa on 
which I lay, and brought me some dinner. 

Then only, and seeing that I could not eat a morsel, did 
she permit me to explain the cause of my sudden return. 
I shall never forget her look of dismay when she heard 
that I had sacrificed everything and ruined my career for 
no rational object whatever. Somehow or other, once in 
her presence, I found it wholly impossible to explain why I 
had done all this. I felt dazed and ashamed. I could tell 
her, who seemed serenity and good sense personified, all 
about my melancholy state, my irresistible desire to return 
home, and the relentless fate which was oppressing me. 
She, knowing nothing of the sentimental epidemic, took 
these words for a sort of delirious raving ; and what with 
my strange looks and stranger adventures, she strongly 
suspected that I must be insane — and perhaps she was not 
very far from the truth. The following day my old mas- 
ter, Dr. Willibald, was sent for in great haste. As soon as 
he had recovered from his first shock of astonishment at 
the news, he pretended to consider the whole matter as 
quite natural, said that he had predicted it all along, and 
that that was what came of not listening to his admonitions.. 
However, he was wholly unable to give Ottilie any advice 
on the subject, and pondered vainly over a means of recov- 
ering a dozen excellent linen shirts, a score of well- bound 
books and other valuables, which I had left behind at the 
university. Meanwhile, I was in bed, and, as soon ap' 
peareq, ill— ill of exhaustion and excitement. 


0TT1L1E. 


75 


My malady lasted a good time ; it left me bodily weak, 
but at least mentally healthy. One morning during my 
convalescence, as the sunbeams played amid the folds of 
my white bed-curtains, and outside the swallows flew to 
and fro with that rushing, cutting sound which has always 
been so dear to me, it seemed as if a horrible weight had 
been removed from my heart and a mist cleared away from 
my eyes. I got up, dressed, and went to the open window. 
I leaned both arms on the scarlet cushion and peeped over 
the tops of geraniums and carnations. On one side was 
the tortuous, rough-paved street, in which the sunshine 
was alternated by the deep shadows of the old bay-win- 
dows, from which hung flowers, forming bright spots on 
the deep-hued old wood. The servant-maids were sweep- 
ing the house-steps and drawing water at the fountain sur- 
mounted by the stone knight. Turning in the other direc- 
tion I could see the Geist Kirche, in whose niches only one 
poor little saint had been left by our over-zealous Lutheran 
fathers. The church was surrounded by a double row of 
old lime-trees, forming a little square, closed in by chains, 
on which some schoolboys were swinging, with their heels 
up and their heads down, in a state of high enjoyment. 
And meanwhile the swallows were crossing and recrossing 
before the window, with their dear, cheerful, breezy noise. 
A new life seemed to dawn for me. I was released from 
all routine of study, free from every sickly fancy ; I had 
nothing to do bulr to live. And the life I led during the 
first months after my return, and after my mental and 
bodily cure, was indeed sweet. I walked about in all the 
dear, well-known places with my sister. I read only such 
books as amused me. I began several pieces of literary 
work, which I was too happy, too free and buoyant, to care 
to finish. I enjoyed all the pleasures of convalescence; 
but as my recovery became complete, a certain lassitude 
came over me. I wished to do something, but could not 
find the courage to begin, and with habitual yawns came 
regret and almost remorse. Why had I left the university? 
Fool that I had been ! But what was the use of regretting ; 
it was now too late to repair. In short, the peace and idle- 
ness which had seemed so delightful after the feverish ex- 
citement which had preceded them, were beginning to be 
distasteful to me. 

At the same time I could foresee no termination to this 
state of matters, for there was no possibility of returning to 
the university after my disgraceful flight, and I saw noth- 
ing else that could occupy my energies. But interest, the 
most unexpected, suddenly came to mg. 

One day, being bored to death, I took it into my head to 
pay a round of visits to some of my old playmates. 


0TT1LIE. 


76 

The first I found on my path was the good, stupid Kas* 
per, who, having been cured of his absurd passion for my 
sister, had studied theology, given up shooting, and was 
now settled in life as a most exemplary husband, father, 
and pastor of souls. He received me with open arms, and 
introduced me to his wife, a lady of the purest Questen- 
burg type, very white, very fat, and heavily merry, by 
whom Kasper was led about as by a married Amazon. 
Despite their cordiality, neither of the worthy couple pos- 
sessed much attraction for me ; yet I found myself fre- 
quenting their house, scarcely knowing why or wherefore. 
Yet the reason was very simple. One of the inmates of 
the pfarrer’s house was his wife’s cousin, an extremely 
pretty little blonde, full of grace and vivacity. The first 
time I ever saw her, she was seated sewing by a window, 
the creeping plants of whose flower-pots formed a beau- 
tiful framework of stems and leaves for her delicate little 
curly head. She was sewing at a new dress, and humming 
a popular song ; and at that moment she struck me as so 
pretty that some time lat er I tried to reproduce that scene 
in some lines. I reminded her in them, how, as children, 
we had played together, and how she had one day tied me 
hand and foot to a chair. I added that I feared she might 
now be tying me down once more, but with how much 
harder bonds. 

Of course I kept these lines to myself. Wilhelmine — 
for it was that same Wilhelmine whom *Kasp.er had once 
called “little devil,” and threatened to throw out of the 
window — Wilhelmine would either not have understood a 
word of them, or been grievously offended. She was an 
adorable little creature, with a mixture of modesty and 
archness, and a constant, birdlike cheerfulness. Hence- 
forth I no longer suffered from variety of thought and de- 
pression, and Ottilie remarked with surprise and pleasure 
the improvement in my spirits. 

One day I found Wilhelmine as usual at the window, 
but her work lay on her knees and she was absorbed in a 
book, which, blushing at being caught, she laid down at 
my approach. 

“What has the power of so interesting you?” I asked, 
glancing jealously at the book which lay on her work- 
table. I thought I knew that thin, shabby little volume in 
the gray binding. I took it up, opened it, and read a line 
— I durst not raise my eyes for shame and confusion. The 
book was a collection of lachrymose poems which I had 
published anonymously at the university, and which— 
Heaven only can tell . how— had got to Questenburg, and 
into her possession. 

Wilhelmine blushed at being caught reading poetry; I 


OTTILIE. 


77 


too blushed, but it was from shame. I felt ashamed that 
these miserable, false, artificial pieces of morbid vapidness 
should be read by that sweet, gay creature, so lovely in 
her cheerfulness and simplicity. 

W ilhelmine looked up in my face ; she thought I despised 
her for reading them. 

“They are so beautiful,” she said, hesitatingly. 

“ Do you think so?” And I shrugged my shoulders con- 
temptuously. 

“Don’t you think them beautiful, really?” she asked, 
eagerly. “Have you seen that lovely piece beginning, 
k The unhappy Morna wept over her harp in the pale moon- 
light’?” 

She repeated one or two lines of that most insipid piece 
of imbecility, and her voice and look almost made them 
seem good to me. 

“ Do you know who wrote them?” she asked. 

My vanity was too great. 

“Would you like to know the author, Jungfer Wilhel- 
mine?” 

“ Is he here?” she exclaimed, in excitement. 

“ He has the honor of standing before you.” And I 
made a graceful bow, clashing my heels together. 

“ You ! Is it possible ? ’ ’ 

Thus passed the winter, In the spring I went with the 
pastor’s family and a large number of friends (Ottilie 
never cared for these riotous meetings) into the woods, to 
pick that pretty, sweet-scented little herb crowned with a 
tiny white star, which they call “May-herb.” Back at 
home, Wilhelmine and the pastor’s wife washed the earth 
off the fragrant plants, and placed immense bundles of 
them in soup-tureens, together with lemon-rind, sugar, 
cloves and cinnamon ; white-wine was poured into the ves- 
sels, and the whole put by to ferment in the cellar. 

Some days later I received an invitation to drink the 
“ May-wine ” at the pastor’s house. Ottilie was of course 
invited, but, as usual, she preferred staying at home and 
playing duets with Dr. Willibald. I must confess, to my 
shame, that I was relieved by this decision ; I felt shy of 
meeting Wilhelmine in Ottilie's presence. What could she 
have thought of my caring for a girl so— so— in short, so 
different from herself? 

I put on my new apple-green coat, with brass buttons, 
and an embroidered yellow waistcoat. I stuck a scarlet 
geranium in my hat, and betook myself to the pastor’s 
house. Wilhelmine seemed more charming than ever with 
her white pinafore on, filling our glasses with the fragrant 
cool mixture; and as she methodically put her empty 
spoon into the jar, and carefully brought it out filled to the 


78 


0TT1L1E. 


brim, I composed a little May -wine song, which we all sang 
in chorus over the supper- table. 

Then there were long walks and excursions all through 
the summer. On Sundays, after the second sermon, the 
pfarrer, his family, and a few friends, would walk to 
some mill by the riverside, where the miller served coffee 
and cinnamon cake ; or else to some ruined castle in the 
woods, where Wilhelmine spread a tablecloth and un- 
packed her hampers of provisions on the mossy ground ; 
and after laughing, dancing, games, and ghost story-tell- 
ing, we all returned home in the early moonlight. 

This idyllic life awakened my muse; not indeed that 
whimpering lady of university days, but a cheerful and 
simple one — not unlike, as I thought, my dear little 
Wilhelmine. 

A short time before, Voss’ “Louise ” had created a great 
sensation; it was a pleasant and original poem, in which 
the meter and style of Homer were used to describe, rather 
over-minutely and pompously, the life of a rustic clergy- 
man. It produced a number of imitations which, together 
with itself, were swept away into oblivion by Goethe’s 
‘ ‘ Hermann and Dorothea. ’ ’ I too was fired by this ex- 
ample and set to work upon a poem in hexameters, de- 
scribing my acquaintance with Wilhelmine, our walks, the 
May- wine brewing, and all the little incidents which inter- 
rupted the sweet monotony of our life. I read a few pas- 
sages (not those about herself, of course) to Wilhelmine; I 
don't think she took it for prose, but it pleased her never- 
theless, and pleased me because it pleased her. I felt 
bound to submit it to my sister, but I was ashamed. I 
gave her the first two cantos, and bolted out of the house. 
I did not venture to sit near her while she was reading 
those lines which contained the first revelation of my love 
for Wilhelmine. I returned for supper. We sat opposite 
each other. She scarcely made a remark, but I felt some' 
thing was coming. I could not eat, and tied my napkin 
into knots, and made little houses of bread-crust without 
venturing to look Ottilie in the face. When we had finished 
supper, she opened a drawer, took my manuscript from it, 
and handed it gravely to me. 

‘ ‘ Here is your poem, 1 ’ she said ; but a second later her 
assumed indifference gave way. She threw her arms round 
my neck, and asked why I had waited so long to tell her a 
piece of news that must make her so happy as that of my 
attachment for Wilhelmine. I felt ashamed before so 
much goodness, ashamed of having been unable to conceive 
its existence. Then I told her how much I loved Wil- 
helmine, how sweet a girl she was ; and talked a deal of 
rubbish about the noble and delightful task of cultivating 


OTTILIE. 79 

so charming a flower, of raising her by the power of love to 
my own level. 

Ottilie smiled incredulously at all this ; she knew it to be 
mere self-delusion, but she knew also that such delusions 
are worth keeping. I firmly believed all this : I was in 
love with Wilhelmine, and I therefore fancied she must be 
worthy of my love ; well, perhaps she was, for my love was 
not worth much. My head was full of golden plans for the 
future, but somehow or other my sister was always left out 
in them; at least, she formed no necessary part of them. 
This sometimes struck me. I felt wicked, and kissed Ot- 
tilie, and felt as if I could cry. She merely smiled, for she 
little dreamed what was passing in my mind. 

Ottilie, of course, expected me to conform to our good old 
German custom of long engagements, and so did Wil- 
helmine’s parents. They would not hear of giving their 
daughter to a young fellow without any occupation in life. 
They wished me to go forth, and return to marry Wil- 
helmine only when I should have gained the means of sup- 
porting her. Ottilie, on the other hand, while strongly im- 
pressed with the reasonableness of these views, was mainly 
swayed by a fear that I might repent of so rash a step as 
that of marrying the very first girl I fancied. Wilhelmine 
she thought well of, but she earnestly washed to give me 
time to know her, myself, and the world better, before ir- 
revocably fixing my destiny. This opposition enraged me ; 
it seemed to me as if time were merely being lost. I hated 
the idea of once more entering the world all alone. I al- 
most dreaded that my dreams might be realized too late — 
that I might attain the prize when I had grown weary 
of waiting for it. I w T as impatient to realize my ideal, and 
no exhortations could stop me. Once, as Ottilie had been 
entreating me to take time to consider the matter, impa- 
tience got the better of me, and I let drop ungrateful and 
cruel words : 

“You are wasting my life. I have been taken care of 
too long. Let me take care of myself henceforward.” ^ 

“ Do so,” answered Ottilie. The words had wounded her 
deeply; it was as if I reproached her with wishing to cheat 
me of my happiness. The ingratitude struck her down. 
After that she made no further resistance ; she tried to be 
indifferent to the whole business, yet even at that very 
moment she made a sacrifice, one of the greatest a woman 
of her pride could possibly make. Dr. Willibald got to 

know, through some correspondent of his, that Prince L , 

one of the greatest people at court, was in search of a li- 
brarian for his magnificent library, which had got into 
hopeless confusion, as his excellency cared not a jot about 
books. The salary w^as liberal, considering that the place 


80 


OTTILIE. 


was a sinecure, or very nearly so, and the prince lodged 
the librarian in the villa containing the library. 

“ There is a chance for us!” exclaimed Wilhelmine. 
“We can marry at once! Nothing to do, a good salary, 
lodging! Think, how lucky!” 

The fact of the place being a sinecure, and the post one 
not very far removed from that of a servant, rather dis- 
pleased me ; yet if only I could get the place for the mo- 
ment, I said to myself, and until I could find something 
better, I could marry Wilhelmine at once, and so begin a 
new life without further delay. There was a chance of ob- 
taining this place. I knew it, but I must do myself the 
justice to say that I never mentioned it to Ottilie ; that I 
never asked her to sacrifice her pride so far as to write to 

the aunt of Prince L , to that very electoral princess 

whose service she had so abruptly left, who had been so 
rudely deaf to her explanations and her apologies. To 
apply to the princess would be to subject Ottilie either to 
an insulting rebuff, or to a humiliating forgiveness. The 
princess had been in the wrong, and had persisted in the 
wrong spirit toward her, and she was the last person of 
whom Ottilie could beg a favor — and such a favor ! 

In his unsuspecting meanness, Dr. Willibald mentioned 
the course to Ottilie as one about which there could not be 
a moment’s hesitation. “Only write a line,” he pleaded, 
“ to your former mistress; she is sure to forgive all. I 
will help you to concoct the letter, and you are sure to get 
the post for your brother ; he will be independent, able to 
marry — you will have secured his happiness. ’ ’ 

“ I cannot do it ; I have done enough for him, ” answered 
Ottilie, in a tone which completely silenced Willibald. He 
reported the conversation to me the following day. I was 
never more enraged with him than on that occasion. ‘ 4 My 
sister shall never beg for me, nor will I ever be a pen- 
sioner!” I exclaimed; and ran off to assure my sister that 
I was wholly ignorant of Willibald’s proposal, and that I 
would rather die than submit her to such an humiliation. 

44 1 never thought the proposal came from you,” she an- 
swered, coldly. 

But it was then too late; those words of Willibald’s, 
44 You will secure his happiness,” had revived the memory 
of mine — “You are wasting my life!” No, Ottilie would 
not waste my life ; she would not neglect to secure my hap- 
piness. Rather than expose herself to such a reproach, she 
would sacrifice every particle of pride, and extend her hand 
as a beggar. She had written to her former patroness. I 
did not know it till the answer came ; civil, as that of a 
well-bred aristocrat should be to a former poor dependent, 
and this cold civility was just the greatest insult that could 


0TT1L1E. 


81 


be offered to us. The office of librarian to Prince L 

was promised, and the princess was even so munificent as 
to bid her secretary enclose money to pay my journey to 
the capital, whither I was begged to go as soon as con- 
venient. In my first bitter humiliation I could have 
trampled the letter and money underfoot. This was what 
I had brought on my sister— to be answered like a beggar,, 
and see me treated like a valet ! And she had been a court 
lady, our father had been an officer, our grandfather a 
baron ! And all this what for? To enable me to marry a 
little shop-keeper’s daughter, the niece of a soap-maker! 
My sister tried to soothe me ; she had felt the sacrifice more 
bitterly than I could have done, but she had made up her 
mind to it; it was her duty; there could be no further com- 
plaint. Wilhelmine, on the contrary, was overjoyed; and 
for a moment her joy made me almost hate her. She was 
quite happy to live in the position of a servant; why not? 
She was not well-born like ourselves. And I could be in 
love with her? Well, I was, and very much in love — so 
much in love that the near prospect of my happiness soon 
made me forget all humiliations. 

There remained yet another sacrifice for my sister — 
that of a parting. We could not find any one desirous of 
buying our house at Questenburg, and, short of selling it, 
there was no means of raising funds to enable her to live in 

the capital, where Prince L allowed me and my wife 

food and lodging, but no spare premises which could be oc- 
cupied by Ottilie. 

However, it was agreed that no effort should be spared 
to sell the house, and that at the worst I, on my part (con- 
sidering I should be free of board and lodging), and she \ 
on hers, might save up sufficient money for her to join us i 
according to my calculations, at the end of two years, i 
This was a great consolation ; I felt quite gay. Besides, 1 
who knows I might not make money by some literary 
work? But Ottilie seemed sad— so sad that it quite vexed 
me. 

“ Why are you not happy when I am?” I asked Ottilie 
.on the morning of my wedding. 

“ 1 am happy,” she answered. 

Perhaps she believed herself to be ’really so, or at least 
tried to conceal from herself that she was not ; but by tho 
side of Wilhelmine, and my own expansive joyousness, and 
the cheerfulness of all the neighbors, my sister’s happi- 
ness seemed very subdued. After the ceremony my wife 
and I were to set out for the capital. There was a deal of 
crying on the part of all her friends and relatives, Ottilia 
alone did not ciy as we took leave. 


82 


0TT1LIE. 


“In two years at latest,” I cried, as I sprung into the 
traveling chaise after Wilhelmine. 

Ottilie smiled, and taking Dr. Willibald’s arm got out of 
the way of the carriage. It had to turn in the narrow 
square, and again I saw Ottilie standing aside with my old 
teacher. She did not see me, for her head was sunk on her 
breast, but Willibald did, and, instead of a last greeting, 
he made an angry gesture in my direction. Why? Even 
as the carriage rolled off, carrying me and Wilhelmine into 
a life of bliss, I guessed what that gesture meant, and my 
heart stung me; I had said, “In two years!” For me 
those two years were to be years of freedom and happiness, 
without regret for her absence ; so much my voice had 
told her. For her those two years were to be years of 
solitude and bitterness ; that was the meaning of Willibald’s 
gesture. 


CHAPTER IV. 

The first year of my married life and of my residence in 
the capital was most happy. How fortunate I had been in 

obtaining the post of librarian to Prince L ! The prince 

was away oh a diplomatic mission in Russia, and the 
magnificent villa on the outskirts of the town all shut up, 
and left in charge to only a steward and a few old 
servants, and, besides them, Wilhelmine and myself were 
its only occupants. We had a delightful set of rooms over- 
looking the gardens and opening on to the library ; in them 
we were served our meals, as if we belonged to the prince’s 
own family. I felt almost as if I were the owner of all 
this magnificence, and enjoyed my wife’s delight at the 
beautifully laid- out gardens, the magnificently gilded 
rooms, the pictures and statues and furniture, as" if it had 
all belonged to me. 

There was no one else present to claim it all, and the 
sense of grandeur was quite delightful. Could I not take 
advantage of the ample space allotted me, and entreat my 
sister to live without us. i often meditated over the ques- 
tion, but always came to the conclusion that Prince L , 

having bargained only for my wife and myself, I had no 
right to take advantage of his liberality. Perhaps, had I 
very much desired Ottilie’ s company, I should have asked, 
and might have obtained, the prince’s consent to another 
inmate being introduced ; but this never entered my mind. 
The fact was that I enjoyed vastly my new independence, 
my new state of head of a family, my being in my own 
house — or, at least, in a house which, being empty, might 
be considered as mine. 

I was not ungrateful to Prince L , and I deter- 


OTTILIE. 


83 


mined to get his library into perfect order, in which Wil- 
helmine thoroughly agreed with me. She was always 
with me in the library, insisting on helping me in all my 
work. She copied catalogues in the funniest little femi- 
nine scribble, usually bungling the titles and leaving out 
the most important words. When there was nothing to 
copy out she insisted on employing her time cutting out 
and pasting labels, or dusting the books. It was delight- 
ful to see the dear, bright girl seated on the floor among 
a chaos of quartos and folios, scissors and gluepot by her 
side, pretending to be very actively and seriously em- 
ployed. Or els(T she would climb on to a ladder, and with 
her feather-broom bring the dust out of the innumerable 
old volumes, until she appeared as if in a cloud. I would 
look up from my work ; she would immediately chide me 
for my indolence; I, in return, would lift her off the lad- 
der, whether she liked it or no. A battle ensued, she pur- 
suing me with her feather-brush, sending clouds of dust 
into my face; I trying to hide behind the tables and 
reading-desks, until she hunted me out, and we rushed 
through the whole length of the library, jumping over the 
books on the ground, laughing and shouting in a way 
which must have considerably surprised all the philoso- 
phers whose busts looked gravely down upon us. 

These “literary occupations,” as they were officially 
called, suggested some poems, in which I described our 
studies and our battles among the books. But the cata- 
logue did not progress much, and it was lucky for me that 

Prince L never troubled his head about the state of his 

library. In the feeling of my new dignity I took the lib- 
erty occasionally to invite some literary men to partake of 
our fare. The servants said nothing ; they served as much 
as I desired, and on the finest plate. They were afraid of 

my complaining to Prince L in case of a refusal, and I 

quieted my conscience by giving a few thalers to the cook ; 
not enough certainly to pay for the game and fruit and 
wines, but enough to make him anxious to please me. 
After all, was it not better that the vension should be eaten 
and the ripe peaches plucked? Prince L- — was none the 
poorer for it; such at least was Wilhelmine’s argument — 
the argument, I have no doubt, of Eve about the apple. It 
was too funny to see my merry little wife presiding oyer 
one of these literary dinners ; to see her assumed gravity 
and hidden roguishness toward those heavy, learned clod- 
hoppers, and their attempts to please the frolicsome, imp- 
ish creature, whose ways must have put a sad disorder 
into the dusty contents of their venerable heads. 

I did not neglect my wife’s education ; I used to read her 
fragments of classic poetry and expound philosophical the- 


84 


0TTIL1E. 


ories to her with as much gravity as I could muster. She, 
meanwhile, would sit at the table, cutting little rows of 
puppets out of paper, and making them dance across the 
books. This inattention being perceived by me put an end 
to the lesson, which invariably wound up with loud 
laughter. I also took Wilhelmine to the play, which was 
excellent at D in those days. She took a child’s in- 

terest in the representation, squeezing my hand with de< 
light whenever the hero made a fine speech or got a legacy, 
frowning at the villain, weeping copiously at the partings 
of lovers, and barely restraining cries of horror at the vig- 
orous suicides and assassinations in which the dramas of 
those days abounded. 

Ah ! days of joy, of childish joy ! Why did they last so 
short a time? The beginning of all the evil was when, one 

fine day, Prince L returned with an immense train of 

servants. We shrank as it were into a corner; our grand 
time was over. Our delightful apartments had to be sur- 
rended to the master, and we were given instead two rooms 
that looked uncommonly like attics. Complain we could 
not; better rooms had to be reserved for the guests, the 
secretaries, the valets, the lackeys, the cooks— for any one 
who stood in higher estimation with the prince than did 
his librarian. This was not all. The pompous major-domo 
sent me word through his secretary that the servants of 
his excellency could no longer be employed in waiting on 
me and my wife, and that henceforward Herr Bibliothe- 
kar and his lady must be pleased to dine with the rest of 
the household. And what did that mean? Perhaps with 
the prince’s secretaries or chapel-master? Oh, no; they 
were either admitted to his own board or served by special 
servants. The librarian must take his seat at the upper 
servants’ tables, below his excellency’s valet, and between 
his excellency’s head cooks. 

I could have torn every book in the library into rags in 
the first rage of that announcement. -I, the son of an hon 
orable officer, the grandson of a baron, the brother of Ot- 
tilie von Craussen, a writer, a poet, to be seated among the 
prince’s flunkeys! I led my wife to the table, Heaven 
knows with what suppressed rage! Wilhelmine was by no 
means so sensitive; she was vexed at our having lost our 
nice rooms, but as to dining with all these smart and 
pompous people in livery, that seemed no great hardship to 
her. She had never seen any one half as grand, and al- 
most conceived it to be an honor. They were servants, it 
is true; but Wilhelmine had never clearly made out in 
what the position of a librarian differed from that of a 
butler ; to her mind the dignity was pretty well equal. The 
flunkeys saw by my face that I did not relish their com 


OTTILIE, 


pany ; they looked at me with cold contempt, scarcely say- 
ing a word, and began, in their most pompous way. to 
discuss fashionable news. To my horror Wilhelmine list- 
ened quite awe-stricken to the anecdotes and remarks re- 
tailed by the valets and cooks. I saw her eyes open as they 
familiarly mentioned princes, dukes, electors, kings, and 
discussed their family affairs. Electors ! kings ! they had 
seen them, approached them, heard their words. Wilhel- 
mine could not have listened to the chat of a party of 
ambassadors, mitered . abbots, and knights of the Golden 
Fleece, with more respect than she did to these glorious 
lackeys, who showed off their stock of court news as for 
the purpose of displaying their superiority over a shabby, 
conceited bookworm of a librarian. 

So much for the first time. I rigorously maintained my 
reserve toward my table-companions. His excellency 
might indeed force me to dine with his servants, but not 
to talk with them. This obstinate silence irritated the 
whole flunkeydom against me; they soon behaved with 
studied rudeness toward us, exchanging sneers and words 
such as they knew I could not like my wife to hear; and I 
had to swallow my humiliation— bitter, fierce humiliation. 

One day, however, his excellency’s valet permitted him- 
self to use language such as would, perhaps, have pleased 
the prince, but did not please me. I requested him to 
change his subject and expressions, and remember the pres- 
ence of my wife. He merely laughed. I gave my arm to 
Wilhelmine, all terrified at this scene, and led her to our 
room ; then I returned, and in uncontrollable fury caught 
the fellow by the collar and caned him then and there. The 
other servants looked on in amazement and admiration at 
the boldness of the librarian. 

“ You shall get it!” howled the fellow, as I left the room. 

And I did. The next day Prince L ’s secretary brought 

me word that his excellency no longer required my serv- 
ices, and required my rooms. 

What would I have given to be back at Questenburg ! 
But here I must stay, for in the capital at least I might 
obtain work. A friend got me a place as clerk at a banker's ; 
the pay and the work were both small, and I determined 
to strain every nerve in order to gain money by some 
literary work, and possibly obtain a professor’s or tutor’s 
post. 

Wilhelmine, utterly ignorant of money -matters, was 
quite delighted at the little lodging I took, delighted at 
having her own servant-woman, her own kitchen, her own 
storeroom, and prepared to play at housekeeping as she 
had before played at catalogue-making. But I was no 
longer in the mood for play ; for such play was not natural 


86 


OTTILIE. 


to my character, at least not for any length of time. All 
the long-suppressed animal spirits and light-heartedness of 
my nature had burst out under Wilhelmine’s first in- 
fluence ; I was like a child who, long kept to its books, sud- 
denly finds itself in the company of other children ; but the 
books have had an influence on the child, and it will not 
play as long as its companions. So it was with me; all 
this frivolous gayety had found its vent, but it had ex- 
hausted itself. I had been brought up alone with a serious 
and thoughtful woman ; my character had been cast in a 
serious mold, and I was now tired of the life of almost 
childish thoughtlessness and mirth which I was leading. I 
had now enough of laughing and romping, and longed for 
some mind, strong and serene, with which I could repose 
in intellectual quiet; just as, when a child, I used to re- 
turn, wearied of the schoolboys’ games, to ask my sister 
for a story or a song. What would I not then have given 
for Ottilie ! But Ottilie could not come. 

The two years were drawing to a close, and, instead of 
savings, I found only debts; I was separated from her by 
the deep gulf of poverty. Yet how imperiously I felt the 
want of society like hers ! My wife was by my side, ready 
to laugh and be merry; but how could I say to her, “ I am 
tired of laughing; I long for serious talk?” She would not 
have understood me. When I attempted to discuss my 
plans and ideas with Wilhelmine I invariably perceived 
that she did not understand them; she understood my 
words, but not my mind. More than once, with Wilhel- 
mine seated opposite me, I have felt alone — terribly, irre- 
mediably solitary. 

Yet I had not the courage to own to myself that I had 
committed a fatal error in imagining that a childish char- 
acter like Wilhelmine could suffice for the happiness of a 
man like myself, older in temper than in years. I buried 
myself in my book ; I tried to fill up the blank in my life 
by working for money and for fame: I tried to persuade 
myself that a little money and a little reputation would 
make me happy. And little by little Wilhelmine’s spirits 
began to sink — our poverty, the necessity for my con- 
stantly working, the continual preoccupation in which she 
found me— all this began to chill her warm nature ; indif- 
ference and dissatisfaction are terribly contagious. At 
first she could not well understand what had changed in 
our relations ; she thought it was merely the want of money 
which made me gloomy, but later she became conscious that 
there was a deeper evil : she thought me cold and ungrate- 
ful; she became unhappy also at our not having a child, 
and attributed my coldness to this cause. Would we had 
had a child ! not that I cared much about one ; I had had, 


0TTIL1E. 


87 


as it were, but too much childishness for the last three 
years ; but it would have been a bond of union, a common 
interest (alas ! there could be no other) between us ; above 
all, it would have been something to take my place in poor 
Wilhelmine’s affections. 

Have you read Jean Paul’s “Fruit, Flower, and Thorn 
Pieces”? If you have, you doubtless smiled at the de- 
scription of Siebenkas’ married life ; but when I first read 
the book I could have sobbed over it, for I knew such a 
life — the double isolation of an intellectual man and an un- 
intellectual woman, childless and without any interest in 
common — such a miserable life as that of Siebenkas and 
Lenette. And Siebenkas had had a friend; I had none; 
and after all he had pretended to be dead and let his wife 
marry Pelzstiefel ; there was no such remedy possible for 
me. 

Thus we lived on, most of our acquaintances deeming us 
a very happy couple, we who were so unhappy! I felt the 
weight of the chain I bore, but I knew that I had riveted 
it with my own hand, and that in justice I must bear it 
without complaint. Besides, I, a man, could bear it. True, 
I was severed from all I really loved : true, there was a 
terrible void in my heart ; but I could find work to distract 
and absorb my thoughts, I could find men capable of un- 
derstanding me. But Wilhelmine, poor little childish 
soul, living only for love, and with whom love meant only 
play, who could sympathize with her? who could fill up the 
void in her life? I felt that the fault was on my side. I 
knew that my blunder had faded this sweet, simple little 
flower. I saw her droop and wither; I felt remorse and 
rage at myself ; I tried to return to our former life ; I threw 
my manuscripts into the fire, locked up my books. I took 
her to the play, to balls, and on excursions. I would have 
given my last penny to see once more that bright look of 
former days in her face. I tried to revive that happy, fool- 
ish life of five years ago. All in vain ; both of us were too 
much altered. Wilhelmine let herself be led about pas- 
sively ; nothing could cheer her, nothing could amuse her. 
Her bright, confiding temper had altered into a sullen, 
brooding apathy. She took a kind of pleasure in rebuffing 
my advances. I did my best, only to make matters worse. 
Formerly I had sat down to my desk and wished to be 
serious when Wilhelmine had wanted to romp and laugh; 
now that I tried to amuse her she wished to be serious. 
When I asked her to take a walk she chose to stay at home 
and read her lachrymose novels; when I proposed going to 
the play, she had a headache, and preferred keeping her 
room. I perceived that my efforts were being intentionally 
frustrated, that she took a pleasure in widening the gulf I 


88 


OTTILIE. 


was trying to bridge over. Her sullen reserve, her cold, 
prudish smile began to irritate me ; I became peevish and 
rough. 

One day I lost all control over myself : I had proposed, 
as a last attempt, to take her a little journey (she had once 
delighted in the notion) in the great forest near the capital. 
She declined coldly, and was for resuming her eternal 
novel, but I snatched the book, and, with an exclamation 
of impatience, threw it into the open stove. I was very 
sorry the moment afterward. I humbly implored her for- 
giveness ; she smiled coldly. 

‘ ‘ There is nothing to forgive, 1 ’ she said, prudishly ; ‘ £ only 
a trumpery book burned;” and so saying she drew a sec- 
ond volume from the drawer of her work-table. 

That was the beginning of the end. During this miser- 
able time my thoughts had constantly reverted to my sis- 
ter, whom, in the ingratitude, of happiness, I had left all 
alone. All alone ! I now knew all that these words mean ; 
I had learned it from my own craving for sympathy. I 
thought of Ottilie sitting down day after day to her lonely 
meals, going day after day on her solitary walks ; the bit- 
terness of a sort of remorse was added to the misery of my 
own isolation. 

One day I could bear it no longer. I told my wife I had 
determined to return to Questenburg, and asked her to 
prepare for departure. 

“To Questenburg!” she exclaimed, unable to hide her 
surprise beneath her usual assumed indifference. ‘ ‘ Why 
should we return to Questenburg?” 

She should have known! Had she no recollection of 
Ottilie, of all Ottilie had been to me? 

“Because I want to see my sister,” I answered, im- 
patiently. 

“ You have done very well without her these five years; 
I don’t see why there should be any such hurry,” an- 
swered Wilhelmine, peevishly. 

“Ido.” 

“ Oh!” exclaimed Wilhelmine, “ that alters the question. 
I did not know that your sister was so necessary to your 
happiness.” 

Her cold, sneering tone exasperated me. 

“She is necessary to my happiness!” I exclaimed. 
“Would to Heaven I had known it earlier!” 

At these hasty words my wife forgot all her sullen pa- 
tience; this seemed insult added to injury— injury long 
rankling in her heart. What! I was so weary of her that 
1 needed Ottilie ! What ! she had grown so old and dull 
that Ottilie was required to amuse me ; she was to be the 
servant, the pupil of my sister! No; to Questenburg she 


OTTILIE. 


89 


Would never return ! And in that outburst of long pent-up 
anger, Wilhelmine dared to insult Ottilie’s age and looks; 
to insult the life which had been faded in my service. At 
that moment Wilhelmine seemed transformed; a coarse 
and narrow mind was revealed to me, such as I had never 
guessed, beneath her sweet exterior; indifference on my 
part was changed into positive aversion. There was a ter- 
rible scene — a series of terrible scenes — provoked daily, 
hourly, by a word or a look. Then, as if exhausted, my 
wife locked herself up in her room. Her meals were car- 
ried in by the servant ; she would not permit me to ap- 
proach. Nor did I wish to ; I was dazed and bewildered by 
this new phase in our relations. I knew not how it might 
all end, but this much I determined — to return to Questen- 
burg at any price to seek advice and aid from Ottilie. 

So a fortnight passed, and my wife would not leave her 
room. One day a visitor was announced ; it was her fa- 
ther. Me he did not deign to notice, but walked into her 
room as if he were in his own house and I a total stranger. 
I understood all : Wilhelmine had sent for him. Did she 
hope to frighten me back into love? or was it mere violence 
of anger? I waited calmly for the old man to leave her 
room. He did so, and then began violently to upbraid 
me. He was a coarse, passionate man, and had never 
much approved of his daughter’s marriage with me. There 
was no stemming his abuse, no possibility of making him 
listen to reason. He accused me of neglecting, of insulting 
my wife, of letting her starve, of every possible wrong to- 
ward her. I let him go on, for he seemed more mad than 
sane. At length I could stand it no longer. Forgetting 
who he was, as he had forgotten who I was, I told him to 
leave my house without a word more. ' He did so, but 
leading his daughter with him. I saw him again, but 
her never: to my house she would never return, despite 
all my efforts at a reconciliation. The old man wanted 
to fight me (perhaps that his daughter might be left a 
widow), but instead of a second I sent him a lawyer, who 
drew out a formal separation between Wilhelmine and me. 

Thus ended my brief married life. Had I been wholly or 
partially in the wrong? I cannot tell; all seemed to have 
happened without any volition on my part, by the irresisti- 
ble weight of circumstances. 

When my sister and I had met and embraced, we stood 
for a moment looking silently at each other. Six years 
ago I had left Questenburg scarcely more than a lad, now 
I returned older by twenty years. Ottilie was still slender 
and erect, but deep lines had formed round her mouth and 
eyes, and her serenity was that of a mind which has been 
victorious after long struggles. I felt that there now no 


90 


OTTILIE. 


longer existed any disparity of age between us ; I had suf- 
fered as she had ; but alas ! while she had suffered from a 
generous sacrifice, I had suffered from my own selfish 
willfulness. 

Dr. Willibald came. He was ready to burst out into re- 
proaches against me, to triumph over the dismal ending of 
my egotistic obstinacy; but when he saw me, and the 
change in my appearance, he remained silent and merely 
shook hands. Ottilie bade us sit down at the little supper- 
table arranged as of old; but none of us could eat. We 
talked but little, and no allusion was made to my recent 
troubles; it was all as if nothing had changed since I last 
sat there. After supper Ottilie opened the spinet, Willi- 
bald took his viola da gamba from its case, and they began 
one of those old, familiar duets. 

Poor old Willibald! He and his fiddle had been my sis- 
ter’s only friends during that weary time of solitude. 
They alone had soothed her disappointment when post 
after post passed without bringing a letter from me. I 
felt as in a dream ; I looked round the room — nothing was 
changed, all in its accustomed place. The duet came to 
an end. Willibald put up his viol and returned home. I 
remained alone with Ottilie. She placed both her hands 
on my shoulders and looked into my face as she had done 
when I had first told her of my love for Wilhelmine. We 
were standing near a mirror ; she noticed that I was look- 
ing at the white hairs among her brown ones. She smiled, 
but without any sadness. 

“I have grown old,” she said. 

“So have I,” I answered; “ but we should not complain 
of Time and his doings, since he has taught us that we 
were made only for each other. ’ ’ 

And I kissed those few white hairs. 


[THE END.] 


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693 Border Beagles, by W. G. Simms.. 30 

694 The Shadow of a Sin, B. M. Clay . .10 

695 Wedded and Parted, by B. M. Clay.10 

696 The Master of the Mine, Buchanan. 10 

697 The Foray ers, by Simms 30 

698 The Mistletoe Bough, M.E.Braddon. 20 

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701 Lady Darner’s Secret, B. M. Clay.. 20 

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706 No. 99, by Arthur Griffiths 10 

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708 Fors Clavigera, by Ruskin. P’t II.. 30 

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711 Undine, by Baron de la Motte 

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712 Woman, by August Bebel 30 

713 Fors Clavigera, by Ruskin. P’t III. 30 

714 Fors Clavigera, by Ruskin. P’t IV.30 

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725 Dr. Wilmer’s Love, Margaret Lee.. 25 

726 Austin Eliot, by Henry Kingsley.. 20 

727 For Another's Sin, by B. M. Clay.. 20 

728 The Hillyars and Burtons, Kingsley 20 

729 In Prison and Out, by Stretton 20 

730 Romance of a Young Girl, by Clay. 20 

731 Leighton Court, by Kingsley .20 

732 Victory Deane, by Cecil Griffith. .20 

733 A Queen amongst Women, by Cla} r .10 

734 Vineta, by E. Werner .20 

735 A Mental Struggle, The Duchess., 20 

736 Geoffrey Hamlyn, by H. Kingsley.. 30 

737 The Haunted Chamber, “Duchess’\10 

738 A Golden Dawn, by B. M. Clay 10 

739 Like no Other Love, by B. M. Clay.10 

740 A Bitter Atonement, by B. M. Clay .20 

741 Lorimer and Wife, by Margaret Lee.20 

742 Social Solutions No. 1, by Howland. 10 

743 A Woman’s Vengeance, by Holmes. 20 

744 Evelyn’s Folly, by B. M. Clay 20 

745 Living or Dead, by Hugh Conway.. 20 

746 Beaton’s Bargain, Mrs. Alexander.. 20 

747 Social Solutions, No. 2, by Howland. 10 

748 Our Roman Palace, by Benjamin. ..20 

749 Mayor of Casterbridge, by Hardy. .20 

750 Somebody’s Story, by Hugh Conway.10 

751 King Arthur, by Miss Mulock 20 

752 Set in Diamonds, by B. M. Clay.. . .20 

753 Social Solutions, No. 3, by Howland. 10 

754 A Modern Midas, by Maurice Jokai.20 

755 A Fallen Idol, by F. Anstey., 20 


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757 Doris’ Fortune, by F. Warden. ... 10 

758 Cynic Fortune, by D. C. Murray... 10 

759 Foul Play, by Chas. Reade 20 

760 Fair Women, by Mrs. Forrester ... .20 

761 Count of Monte Cristo, Part I., by 

Alexandre Dumas 20 

761 Count of Monte Cristo, Part II., by 

Alexandre Dumas 20 

762 Social Solutions, No. 4, by Howland. 10 

763 Moths, by Ouida 20 

764 A Fair Mystery, by Bertha M. Clav.20 

765 Social Solutions, No. 5. by Howland. 10 

766 Vixen, by Miss Braddon 20 

767 Kidnapped, by R. L. Stevenson.. . .20 

768 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and 

Mr. Hyde, by R. L. Stevenson. . 10 

769 Prince Otto, by R. L. Stevenson. . .10 

770 The Dynamiter, by R. L. Stevenson. 20 

771 The Old Mam’selle’s Secret, by E. 

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772 Mysteries of Paris, Part I., by Sue.20 

772 Mysteries of Paris, Part II., by Sue.20 

773 Put Yourself in His Place, by Reade. 20 

774 Social Solutions, No. 6, by Howland. 10 

775 The Three Guardsmen, byDumas.20 

776 The Wandering Jew, Part i.,by Sue.20 

776 The Wandering Jew, Part II., by Sue.20 

777 A Second Life, by Mrs. Alexander. 20 

778 Social Solutions, No. 7, by Howland. 10 

779 My Friend Jim, by W. E. Norris ..10 

780 Bad to Beat, by Hawley Smart 10 

781 Betty’s Visions, by Broughton 15 

782 Social Solutions, No. 8, by Howland. 10 

783 The Octoroon, by Miss Braddon — 20 

784 Les Miserables, Part I., by Hugo. .20 
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784 Les Miserables, Part III., by Hugo. 20 

785 Social Solutions, No. 9, by Howland. 10 

786 Twenty Years After, by Dumas .... 20 

787 A Wicked Girl, by Mary Cecil Hay .10 

788 Social Solutions.No. 10. by Howland. 10 

789 Charles O’Malley, P’t I., by Lever. 20 

789 Charles O’Malley, P’t II., by Lever. 20 

790 Othmar, by Ouida 20 

791 Social Solutions, No. 11, by Howland. 10 

792 Her Week’s Amusement, by “The 

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793 New Arabian Nights, by Stevenson. 20 

794 Tom Burke of Ours, P’t I., by Lever.20 

794 Tom Burke of Ours, P’t II., by Lever. 20 

795 Social Solutions,No.l2, by Howland. 10 

796 Property in Land, by Henry Georg<°.15 

797 A Phantom Lover, by Vernon Lee. 10 

798 The Prince of the Hundred Soups, 

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799 Maid, Wife, or Widow? by Mrs. 

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800 Thorns and Orange Blossoms, by 

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801 Romance of a Black Veil, by Clay.10 

802 Lady Valworth’s Diamonds 10 

803 Love’s Warfare, by B. M. Olay 10 

804 Madolin's Lover, by B. M. Clay 20 


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